I'm surprised that they admitted that their cost to produce the phone in China is $550 and they sell it for $799, while the cost to produce the phone in the US is $650 and they sell it for $2000. That's a 45% markup on one and 207% markup on the other.
Taking just those figures in mind, they shouldn't be at all worried about tariffs - anything more than an 18% tariff, it's cheaper for them to build in the US than China for US customers. Honestly, that's much lower than I expected, especially considering they're even more restrictive in their component sourcing than most companies would need to be because they're catering to a security-focused group.
I guess the real issue is that they don't have any more production capacity in the US, rather than it just being a cost issue.
Define "produce", I guess? The price differential suggests that it refers to final assembly, which is common when components have different tax codes than the final product.
Creating domestic jobs this way doesn't have a great track record however. They are usually quite expensive. And they don't help the geopolitical uncertainty at all, which is at least hinted at being something of an end goal.
Sure, you can ship parts all over the phone and have assembly in the final country. But what does that solve? What people usually think of when discussing where products are "produced", the components or at least a majority thereof, is the same.
Where do you source OLED screens in necessary quantity to produce a popular mobile phone model in the US, or any other Western country? Or the batteries? It's not a question of cost. It a question of non-existence.
Changing global production is a not a singular problem but something that would require laser focus during several decades and many different areas just to be something that could be taken seriously.
I don't see how the US can compete with China on sheer production and access to manufacturers and suppliers of tech, compared to cities like Shanghai, Qingdao and Shenzhen, among others. It's like a candy store for engineers. Building a single plant just isn't economically feasible when you have so much uncertainty from the chaos at the WH. Not to mention, this will take a decade or much, much more.
A better way (IMO) to do it would have been tax incentives to build US plants to move manufacturing back in the US, have research university programs as feeders for tech innovation centers, and funding for technical colleges to expand their programs for skilled labor needed instead of gutting multiple agencies that would have overseen/guided this expansion. And oversight, of course. And attainable goals set in contracts to receive funding, not just, "here's a pile of money we'll forget about in 4 years."
Digikey, McMaster-Carr. Lots of other options. they might not have a store front in your city, but they can get you everything you need for reasonable prices.
No sane company wants to work that way. Just in Time is a great thing, you shouldn't be over nighting anything you should be working so that you know when you need each part months in advance. If you can get a part in China faster it is because someone has expensive inventory and that is a bad sign in general. You do of course need some emergency supply and such, and retail customers don't plan in advance well - but a business shouldn't be buying retail anyway.
It's not JIT, it's that planning works on months advance notice like you mention is in large part because the supply chain is global and shipping takes a lot of time. When digikey has a month lead time because some component is out of stock, it often means "It's going to take a month for this to arrive from the factory".
In China, you can just go down the street to the factory.
As for shipping overnight, it's incredibly common in R&D and repair.
Only if the factory in China will make that thing today. If they are one their New Year holiday (I forget what they call it) you won't get anything. If they are busy making something else you won't get anything - unless by human factors you can convince them to work for you instead of meeting their promises to other customers.
Sure, but you don't have to wait 6 weeks for a cargo ship.
The concept of having centralized full-chain production for enormous productivity boosts is not some wild concept, it's ancient and well known. Industries have clusters because it benefits everyone in the cluster. The US has very few and weak manufacturing clusters.
This is a chicken-and-egg problem. It's economically irrational for any given individual to pursue vocational training in a field where there isn't a job waiting for them at the end. You can make the training in these fields available, but without the jobs, who will bother using it?
One of the root causes of the situation we find ourselves in is that the federal government has been subsidizing higher education beyond diminishing returns for decades. Simply removing the mechanisms to do that would be a net improvement.
If you're sincerely interested in the answer to that question, I'd highly recommend reading the article, because a good portion is dedicated specifically to answering that.
I read the article - up to a point. The guy goes to such great lengths not to admit that a huge proportion of the physical parts in the phone are from China. E.g, he keeps saying "Western distributor" to avoid saying "China-made." (Think about it: why would any reader care about the distributor's nationality?!) He just rambles on and on, trying to baffle us with bullshit - eventually I stopped reading.
There is zero chance that a smartphone will ever be made out of 100% US-manufactured parts, or even close to it. And the evidence is right in this article, if this is the best effort to manufacture a "US phone."
The article does, in fact. Their US made phone is manufactured, not just assembled, in the United States, and also attempts to source nearly all parts and materials from US suppliers as well.
Yes, and article starts out by definining manufacture as "assembly using more advanced tools than a screwdriver". They solder. Good for them. They keep mentioning that their resistors are made in the US. That's great, but not unique to them.
They don't manufacture their important components. Not even Apple does that. No one does. There is roughly zero chance that any of the non-interchangable bits, the SoC, the battery or the screen, is manufactured in the US.
And there is nothing wrong with that. It's just silly to pretend otherwise.
As I read that, "more than a screwdriver" was to make a point about how hard it is to even fulfill the requirements for "assembled in the USA". "Made in the USA" is even stricter. And they were going beyond that and claiming secure supply chains with western distribution. It did seem a little like a marketing pitch since it focused on what they did versus what the final gap really was, but apparently they sell it to the govt for that big markup. Presumably you don't want to try and sneak things past such a customer.
If you're just thinking of price, the farther down the supply chain you go the less impact of tariffs.
I mean, again, you could essentially just post FUD that is directly refuted in the article, or you could... look. They specifically cite their NXP CPU is manufactured in South Korea. But to act like fabricating the mainboard here in the US is not manufacturing is remarkably silly. Your previous post referred to "final assembly", which would suggest just plugging some final components together, which Purism clearly is doing significantly more than.
Cost is just one part of the equation. What about the ability to quickly switch the supplier of a part, to make a small design change, to ramp up the production of the next model, etc? Lots of articles suggest that you can start manufacturing and adapt much faster in China than in the US.
Also, there is nothing in the article that talks about the quality of the phone. Being manufactured in the US does not automatically make it a high quality product. I'd take an iPhone manufactured anywhere in the world than this Liberty phone.
> the real issue is that they don't have any more production capacity in the US
Economists selling people on free trade like to omit this, but production capacity, efficiency, cost, and technical know-how, aren't static, but improve based on demand.
You do not understand microeconomics. No economist would ever advocate for free trade in an academic environment. Competitive markets are the goal. The older I get the more I think microeconomics should be a basic course for voters. All the things you list “production capacity, efficiency, cost, and technical know-how” are well studied.
I omitted it because I thought it was so glaringly obvious that it didn't need explaining: a factory owner doesn't care what the global or local demand for a product is, but at the demand for his factory's output. Which can increase, despite the consumer demand staying the same, if the competitiveness of other factories diminishes, like from tariffs.
It's $650 in a world in which you don't have tariffs with China.
In a world in which you do, you pay more for the machines, the materials, the components you can't make in the US (a phone is thousands of component, phone makers don't make most of them), etc.
It's probably $650 to design it, build half the parts, ordering most other parts and assemble them.
Now what's interesting with the tariffs is that it's not just it will make the parts you can order more expensive, it will make the supply of such parts available to you restricted since you are now competing with buyers that don't have tariffs and can outbid you easily.
Or course, all this include rare earth supply which China already restricted for US export, so even the part you can make are going to be super expensive. The premium is going to be way more than the tariff ones.
Finally, since you are not going to be able to sell to the Chinese market of 1.5M of people, you will sell fewer phones, meaning your volume effect will be lower.
Meanwhile, competitors from Asia and Europe will be able to sell to the rest of the world, unrestricted by such problems, so much more price competitive and with a more robust cash flow. So you will lose markets in other areas too, hitting your volume effect even more, possibly sending you spiraling.
Is this the price in just components? I skimmed through the article and that wasn't clear. Because if it doesn't include labor costs, then its reasonable that the US phone sells for a lot more.
> Cost of goods sold (COGS) refers to the direct costs of producing the goods sold by a company. This amount includes the cost of the materials and labor directly used to create the good. It excludes indirect expenses, such as distribution costs and sales force costs.
So the $550 or $650 COGS includes the cost of labor for manufacturing, but excludes (say) marketing and auditing costs.
Right, but this is the same company, so the cost of marketing, auditing, R&D, etc. shouldn't be different for these products. That's a fixed cost for the company.
This is a guess, but the argument is probably that it took way more R&D effort for them to figure out how to produce it efficiently in the US, and they've chosen to increase the cost of the US phone variant to offset this particular R&D expenditure that the Chinese variant didn't have.
> So it's about $650 to produce that entire phone. But what we're doing by selling it for greater originally, we're looking at a lot of differentiators for us. It wasn't just made in the USA. It's the fact that it's a secure supply chain, that you know, staff that's completely auditing every component, which means we're selling to a government security market with all those additional layers that we've added on top.
So I guess the answer is that they're selling to the "government security market" so they can charge whatever the hell they want.
It is not just the labor/components, but that it is for a different market with different expectations and requirements. From the article:
> You can look at our concrete numbers. We sell a Chinese made Librem 5 phone for $799. We sell the Liberty phone for $2,000. When you're looking at just those numbers alone, that looks like a giant leap in cost. But there's a couple of factors that are not publicly known when you're looking at just those prices. When you're looking at COGS, cost of goods sold, our Librem 5 phone is equivalent in cost to about an iPhone. It's about $500 and some odd dollars, $550. So we can see that the Librem 5 phone doesn't have a very high margin when we sell it. The Liberty phone, same COGS componentry wise, but to produce it on US soil, we're adding not quite a hundred dollars. So it's about $650 to produce that entire phone. But what we're doing by selling it for greater originally, we're looking at a lot of differentiators for us. It wasn't just made in the USA. It's the fact that it's a secure supply chain, that you know, staff that's completely auditing every component, which means we're selling to a government security market with all those additional layers that we've added on top.
I did find that so surprising that it almost doesn't feel right. Hard to see why they'd bother making two different SKUs in two different places if the cost delta is only $100 they'd surely be better off shifting all the volume to the american phone and working to get it down to down to $550.
How much volume are we talking about. I don't know the important numbers but my guess is the automotion needed to get the in us cost down is more than they sell. That is a million dollar machine that repleces 60 workes is a bad investment when they only have one worker.
It's good they are being transparent. This is the future. Does "produce" include staff salaries involved in manufacture? Does it include salaries for staff in R&D?
My understanding of "cost of goods sold", which is quite likely to be wrong, is yes for the first and no for the second. Or at least, it'd include the pro-rated salaries of the staff for the time spent producing the goods.
I think it's essentially if you had all the designs for a product and asked someone else to manufacture it for you, everything they would spend and charge you for producing the product and delivering it to your ship (or whatever), at which point you take over all the rest of the costs including the shipping.
It's cheaper just to buy the hardware from China and install their OS on it. They overcharge for a lot of their products including their mini pc which you can just boy from aliexpress and install coreboot on it for way cheaper, https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/New-Top-mini-pc-i7-10....
Depends on the product. Purism doesn't only sell existing (such as servers) or modified (such as minis) hw designs, but also completely original ones (such as phones).
True, but they're also outdated hardware rise. They also sell a service for "aweSIM" which is suppose to be a privacy sim card, but they literally just sign up for you and then overcharge you. Better to use a MNVO like US Mobile and giving them fake PI.
Selling something with a markup is how business works. It's up to consumer to decide whether the added value is worth the markup. Seems like it's not for you.
As I mentioned elsewhere in this thread already, while the Librem 5 is becoming dated, there's still no upgrade path on the market. You need to switch to a completely different category of devices in order to get something more performant than that. I hope that'll change soon, regardless of whether it will be Purism coming up with L5v2 or someone else with their own thing.
I suspect the margin differential is more demand/volume driven if for example they think ~90% of the volume will be for the cheaper device than there has to be much higher margins on the US phone to cover the associated investment/overhead
It's remarkable to me that people don't realize that markets are - by definition and design - a race to the bottom. A single decision maker may hold up efficiency for ideological purity, but, ultimately, an efficient corporation is leaving 5% profits on the table if mfg costs 5% more.
It's fairly obvious that trade barriers are good and necessary for a country, not sure why we've allowed this to go on for so long. It's truly fascinating.
> I'm pretty shocked at this price-differential, I guess they are just taking advantage of the lack of competition in the made in USA space.
I assume that the answer is much simpler than the "evil capitalist" narrative: the respective company is much smaller, and produces on a much smaller scale.
Thus it is an economic necessity that some part of the money is better used to build up reserves to be able to survive worse times.
Additionally, the smaller scale means that the development costs are a much larger cost proportion than for a company that produces on a huge scale.
I wasn't saying "evil capitalist", just that when the competition is limited you can charge higher prices, this isn't evil unless you have used unethical tactics to enforce some sort of monopoly/oligopoly etc....
The fact that they sell both the made in china model and the USA model shows it is not about building up reserves, as if they wanted to do that they would have higher prices on both models, not selective pricing, thus we are looking for a factor which affects their USA model but not China model.
Development costs are not really a factor here, they specifically say they developed both versions simulatenously, but yes if they didn/t it would be a factor.
They actually back up my first point by giving the reason for the pricing:
"It's the fact that it's a secure supply chain, that you know, staff that's completely auditing every component, which means we're selling to a government security market with all those additional layers that we've added on top."
If you distill this down it is saying that basically securing the supply chain costs more, but also that it adds value. The government is willing to pay a whole lot more for the same product for that extra supply chain security even if it doesn't cost that much more for the manufacturer to produce because no one else can offer something like this.
Tangentially, I think you'll find a lot of this price inflation happening in the US due to Trump's tarrifs. Even if companies find cheaper places to import, if the customers get used to the higher prices, I find it difficult to imagine they'll drop the cost. Quick to go up, slow to go down.
Only to a certain degree. Wages are probably not going to keep matching price increases. If people have less real disposable income, they aren't going to buy as much.
The important quote: "If the tariff from China is 100%, and you know it is going to be 100 % for the next 10 years, you will make a different business decision than if it is, ‘Might be 100%, not sure what's going to be in three months, what's it going to be in a year from now, and what's it going to be in three years from now.’ That uncertainty does not create stable markets. It does not create very accurate business decisions."
Yeah. If you actually wanted to bring manufacturing back to the US you'd figure out which industries you wanted to develop, probably subsidise them, communicate very clearly what you were going to do and then ratchet up the tariffs on those specific finishes products, whilst being sure to maintain access to raw materials and components you still needed. What you wouldn't do is slap unexpectedly high tariffs on absolutely everything, shout about how you'll do a deal if only they respect you, and then walk them back in as inept and inconsistent a manner as possible. That's what you'd do if you wanted to destroy what's left of your industry. Think there's anyone in the rest of the world relying on US suppliers that hasn't started looking elsewhere? And it might now be cheaper for Americans to import from Japan or South Korea than from US companies dependent on Chinese components in their supply chain...
Subsidizing specific manufacturing and having at least some consistency was a big part of the US strategy until the last few months. Most notably, the US passed huge subsidies for semiconductor manufacturing in 2022.
I don't know how effective that will be but it at least seems more coherent than these goofy tariffs (whatever people think of tariffs overall we absolutely cannot keep shifting them week to week).
> we absolutely cannot keep shifting them week to week
We absolutely cannot create the expectation that we plan to get what we say we want: zero trade deficits.
If we even succeed in making the rest of the world believe we're going to do this it will be catastrophic. So much of the advantages the US enjoys rides on trust and goodwill, and zeroing trade deficits would wreck the world economy and destroy trust in the US dollar as a safe haven. Just like paying down the national debt would.
(Software dev working for a European manufacturer of industrial automation equipment)
We just hit pause on a major product development effort in order to go back and re-evaluate some of our vendor choices. Specifically to see how we can eliminate as many dependencies on US companies as possible. Fortunately we were relatively early in a 18-24 month development cycle for a somewhat complex hardware device.
The company already started a project two months ago to look at how we can migrate off AWS and Azure and instead use domestic alternatives for our online systems.
For the hardware components this is a bit more work, but it looks like we can find replacements for most of the key items. Though there are a few components where we would have to rearchitect some of the systems to eliminate US components.
For us it is simple: we need stability and predictability. We have long development cycles and long lifecycles for the things we make. Stopping development and trying to eliminate things that depend on the US is a bit unreal and shocking, but management have to deal with the world as it is.
I know some of my colleagues at other companies in the sector are going through similar exercises.
Right now changes are taking place that will not be visible for years, but that will stick around for decades. The current administration in the US is doing real, long term damage to the US.
It is really weird for us (Europeans) to read hacker news and it see mostly indifference to what is happening in your country. You probably should worry a bit more about this than you do.
You also wouldn't go out of your way to piss off America's two biggest export markets: Canada and Mexico. As it stands, not only are there significant counter-tariffs that would make U.S. manufacturers even less competitive in Canada[1], there is significant consumer backlash to anything American-made where, just a couple months ago, products "Made in the U.S.A." would have been viewed favourably[2].
The way Trump has done things, any company that manufactures in the U.S. had better be able to get by with just the domestic U.S. market, because exports to Canada and Mexico aren't likely to be significant for quite some time, even if Trump backs off quickly. Lasting damage has already been done.
________________________
[1]It remains to be seen if Mexico will eventually retaliate.
[2]Perhaps not favourably in terms of price/quality competitiveness, but certainly in a geopolitical "support your neighbour instead of China" sense.
It also breaks a lot of the way businesses make and sell stuff today.
For example, several car makers makes cars in Canada, Mexico and the US but sells them across the borders (and globally). Honda makes Civics and CRVs in Canada but sells them in the US, but the Accord is made in the US and sold in Canada. So now if there are tariffs on car imports and especially if there is also a reciprocal tariff, Honda gets hit both ways. What would they do? Make some civics in the US and some in Canada? Seems very inefficient.
Factually despite all the noise there are no significant tariffs in either direction at this point in time, 98% of trade is tariff free under the free trade agreement. Mexico and to a lesser degree Canada are in a more favorable position than they were before the tariffs as they are the only countries in this position [1]
My experience is this: The majority of Americans have a hard time believing we (Canada) are their biggest export market and trading partner generally. Because they barely think about Canada, and when they do it's as a quaint and cold place of no real importance to them.
And this perception has worked in Trump's favour. "Those weak irrelevant people up there are taking advantage of us, time to teach them a lesson" works well when the people you're telling it to don't realize "those people" are their single biggest customer and a source of wealth for them.
American business people aren't generally accustomed to treating their customers this way. I hope they come to their senses.
> No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once.
12th Amendment:
> no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President of the United States.
You can produce the same bullshit arguments for literally any law in existence because language is inherently ambiguous. If someone starts wiggling into, "well technically it's a bit ambiguous whether we're allowed to mow down peaceful protestors with machine guns," it is incumbent upon all of us to say "no, actually that's not ambiguous."
Courts will look to the public attitude to assess these arguments, and the public attitude should be that blatant accounting tricks like the VP switcheroo are incompatible with both the language and intent of the law.
> But winning an election is not the only way a person can become president. And there are hypothetical situations involving presidential succession, Baude adds, that are "not addressed as fully" by the Constitution's text. They reveal ways in which the common understanding of the 22nd Amendment's presidential term limits could be challenged in court.
One theory: Trump could become vice president and then president in 2029
> Still, in court, a lawyer could try to argue that being a "natural born" citizen, at least 35 years old and a resident within the U.S. for at least 14 years are the only presidential eligibility requirements specified in the Constitution, says Stephen Gillers, a professor emeritus at New York University School of Law, who proposed in 2004 that Clinton run for vice president.
I'm unconvinced that the Supreme Court will look towards public sentiment.
I did read it, and that argument is bullshit, just like a hypothetical argument that e.g. the government can mow down protestors because they held a mass trial declaring ("satisfied due process") that all people in the street are guilty of a crime and subject to the death penalty. Nothing in the Constitution precludes such an interpretation.
There is no way to write words that preclude all such interpretations, that does not make all possible interpretations valid or reasonable.
> I'm unconvinced that the Supreme Court will look towards public sentiment.
Yet stunningly, SCOTUS decisions overwhelmingly align with cultural attitudes of their time because that is in fact the role of SCOTUS — to adapt interpretations of text to the current cultural moment. That's why it's notable in the few occasions where they conflict.
I know originalists and textualists like to act otherwise, but they're liars, and you know this because they do in fact rule against the text of law when the text conflicts with their cultural imperatives.
The more hyperbolic the example, the easier it should be to demonstrate why the language of the Constitution precludes it. Yet you cannot, because that's not how language works, per my point. If I start pushing for this interpretation of the Constitution, the civic, intellectual, and honest reaction is not to say, "hmm, actually it is pretty ambiguous!" It's to say: "that obviously is not allowed and would be tantamount to a coup."
Everyone knows Presidential terms are meant to be limited to two. Everyone knows going for a third term would be an accounting trick. They know it, you know it, I know it.
Your selection of one example out of the 47 cases SCOTUS decided that year (+ countless cases they didn't grant cert to) is evidence of my point, not yours. How many of the other 46 cases can you name? How many of the other 81 cases between then and now?
I'll guess you could name fewer than 4 of them, ergo, as I said: "That's why it's notable in the few occasions where they conflict."
I take it then the courts finding on presidential immunity also supports your view of unambiguous interpretations and the court following public opinion?
I said neither that there are unambiguous interpretations (in fact I said the opposite, that all texts are intrinsically ambiguous but that does not make all interpretations equally sound)
Nor did I say "the court follows public opinion."
I said "courts will look to the public attitude to assess these arguments", which is true, and "SCOTUS decisions overwhelmingly align with cultural attitudes of their time" which is also true.
And yes, the Presidential immunity argument is exactly one such argument: the pro-dictator cultural movement in the US is significant and vocal, while the anti-dictator movement is full of equivocators like yourself who say, "well you know, the Constitution is a bit ambiguous on this point..."
So yes, actually, that decision is an excellent case in point, and a clear reason that SCOTUS should know the American public has no pseudo-intellectualized appetite for a third term.
> in fact I said the opposite, that all texts are intrinsically ambiguous but that does not make all interpretations equally sound
Your original comment was this:
> There is absolutely, unambiguously no Constitutional method by which this will ever be true.
So which is it, there's absolutely no ambiguity or there is some?
> And yes, the Presidential immunity argument is exactly one such argument: the pro-dictator cultural movement in the US is significant and vocal, while the anti-dictator movement is full of equivocators like yourself who say, "well you know, the Constitution is a bit ambiguous on this point..."
So you're saying that the Supreme Court ruled Presidential immunity because of vocal public opinion for dictatorship but suddenly the same court won't rule in favor of interpreting the law to support a third term?
Seems contradictory chief. Regardless I personally hope it doesn't come to a court decision but we'll see in 4 years.
I didn't say that SCOTUS won't rule in this direction. In fact, again, my caution indicates I believe the exact opposite: it is very possible they will, which is why we should cede no ground on the "it's ambiguous" argument. It truly is not ambiguous. It is not even ambiguous to the people who are pushing it. Again: everyone knows it's an accounting trick.
Yes, republicans in congress can stop this at anytime, and once people tangibly feel prices increase congressional leaders will get scared.
If congress turns heavy blue in 2026, they can rain hell on the mild conservative goals that Trump seems to have taken a nuclear approach to. Congressman do care about their seat, and they do get scared of losing power. Right now Americans are particularly sensitive to price increases as well, with the pandemic inflation still fresh on everyone's mind.
Personally disappointed to see opposition US liberals in the US still fantasizing that the problem of Trump is going to be solved "eventually" in 2026 or in the courts.
More protests needed. This is tyranny-lite in action, huge overreach by the executive that I'm pretty sure the hallowed founders -- that people always talk about with reverance down there -- would be horrified by. 18th century revolutionaries would be disappointed to see the way people are rolling over.
> communicate very clearly what you were going to do
Probably not. At least, not until right before the ratchet up. You'd want to first subsidize then once industries are starting to build up, you'd want to start the ratchet up. You probably also wouldn't want to say "We are doing this because we want to be better competitors" or whatever. It'd be better if you said something like "We believe country x is doing terrible thing y and for the safety of our country and others we are going to apply a tariff on good z until x stops doing y".
But yeah, universal tariffs are the dumbest idea in the world. We've essentially sanctioned every single nation which is going to massively damage us and manufacturing. Going to be real hard to unwind this.
You might add a bit of "Country X" is bad spin in there as political justification for what you're doing, agreed.
But you would make damn sure you communicated when the tariffs would hit punitive levels so the rest of the value chain knew and had already had chances to find themselves domestic suppliers
Gotta be REAL careful about how you signal things if your intent is ultimately to take over a market. Telling manufacturers you intend to isolate could leak out and ultimately trigger pre-emptive tariffs.
Honestly, just subsidizing is a lot simpler to do and it doesn't run the risk of making the world mad at you or triggering retaliatory tariffs.
You're a lot less likely to get retaliatory tariffs when you're communicating to manufacturers that you intend to raise your $nicheproductclasses tariffs to support domestic manufacturing under industrial strategy and national security policy than when you announce blanket tariffs with threats. The US imposed 100% tariffs on EVs last year for example[1], which wasn't exactly a universally popular move but wasn't likely to provoke a trade war. Much easier to accept losing share of a market than every market, plus also less likely to accidentally punish the manufacturing industries you're trying to support.
[1]there's a certain irony in one of Biden's last actions being to impose tariffs in a way which massively helped Tesla, and one of Trump's first being to propose tariffs that could seriously hurt its supply chain if they don't get exemptions...
Wouldn't you prioritize subsidizing local production over taxing foreign production? It just seems like a much cleaner and more straightforward way to increase local production. It seems like this has been at least somewhat effective with semiconductors over the past ten years. And then you don't have the risk of harming consumers. Everybody wins!
Its why China is technologically eating everyone else's lunch when it comes to renewables and battery tech. Their government dumped massive amounts of money into R&D and building out manufacturing and mining infrastructure.
Heck, it's why the US has been (not for long) a leader in medicine. We've historically dumped huge amounts of money into medical research through the NIH.
Biomedical companies don't like research, they like making money. Research is expensive and by its nature filled with deadends. A biomedical companies would much rather take and run with cheap (to them) NIH research.
Businesses like clear timetables which is the opposite of what Trump is doing right now. So no matter your theories about tariffs what he is doing cannot be good for business.
this narrative doesn't sound right. There isn't very much preventing anyone in any given other country from using NIH research. Moreover a substantial amount of NIH research grants goes to PIs or postdocs or grad-students who are Chinese nationals who then advance their careers back to their home country.
Universities concentrate experts, and that leads to local economies. That's why SF is right outside of Stanford. Google wouldn't be there if that wasn't where Stanford grads lived. The stories about the Chinese government's tremendous efforts to repatriate skilled professionals (like giving them entire factories to run) come about as a result of the fact that they're working against a strong default of staying in the same place.
The customer and taxpayers are generally the same people here.
So, knock on effects can dwarf direct effects. Tax foreign computer components at some insane rate and perhaps you get a domestic market but you could also see companies start moving their US data centers to Canada and Mexico. Which then has it’s own economic disadvantages.
> Because when you subsidize, the taxpayer is paying for it. You are socializing the costs and privatizing the profits.
I think that's a really good point. It's extracting money from consumers through taxes and handing them to industry in the hopes they innovate.
Tariffs though. In that case you're extracting the money from the consumer (through the international organizations being taxed) and giving the profits to the government. What are they going to do with it?
The US got dominance over the entire world's economy, an unprecedented amount of weal, and almost complete technological dominance with high taxation and direct intervention on the market. And even more, they then taught it to Japan who came and repeated basically the exact same actions with basically the exact same result. Oh, yeah, and then China did it...
Then they organized a bunch of morons to create an school teaching not to do that, celebrated them so they would teach every foreign school, and managed to stop most of the world from competing with them. But a couple of decades later everybody in a position of power there was a moron from that school.
The resources for subsidies come from printing new money (which is possible by having the world reserve currency), and then spending that new money for deliberate purposes instead of just giving it to the banksters to bid up the asset bubbles. In an imaginary world where we had a Congress that served the People and a mentally competent President, of course.
Who gets subsidized is indeed political, but I don't see a way to sidestep that since there's centralization as soon as you take action to prevent the currency from deflating.
To be clear, the US is not unique in its ability to do this. Many other countries would benefit from understanding it! In the UK we have a government wanting to build a growth strategy around finance. It's like a parody that nobody gets (yet).
But Congress doesn't actually decide to print new money? When they decide to spend they have to raise taxes or issue debt (treasuries).
The federal reserve, on the other hand, controls interest rates and other mechanisms which actually result in money "bring created" for practical purposes.
Yes, that is one of the mechanisms that has hamstrung us from being able to appropriately respond to the economic effects of offshoring. It can obviously be changed.
Or the mechanisms themselves might not actually have to be changed if we could cast off this myopic political red herring about "the deficit". What we perceive as the balance sheet of "the government" needs to include The Fed, Fannie/Freddie, etc. Treasuries owned by other countries are the equivalent of a big savings account. Treasuries owned by the Fed are the same as all the other other debt owned by the Fed - monetary creation / monetary inflation.
Nobody says it is effective, only that it is possible.
One way could be to send the message to the market that a certain area is strategically important and any startups will have access to extremely cheap loans and not have to worry about natural resources or personel.
Then follow up on those promises, take a step back, watch the Cambrian explosion that follows and when the businesses seems to have grown legs simply scale back funding and watch them fight it out. One could even say that is exactly what has happened in the world several times over. It is not unique to China.
Subsidization also makes products viable outside of the tariff bubble where tariffs can only really make it viable to places with the same tariffs against the same source(s).
If you really wanted to fix the US economy you'd uncouple the $ from the oil markets and let it float downward - the cost of imports would go up and exporters would earn more (and be more competitive in their domestic markets). The BTW is why China is pushing the yuan down now, because unlike Trump, they understand how this stuff works.
Trade imbalances are simply currency imbalances that haven't been allowed to find their own levels - what you can't do is have an artificially high currency (by requiring all global oil sales be made in it, creating an artificial scarcity) and not have a trade deficit - you can't have your cake and eat it too
The dollar is kept artificially strong through oil, so america can maintain an effectively infinite debt and an arbitrarily large deficit without the dollar ever weakening despite how much is printed…
I’m sure this sounds bad to someone, but if I was America, I wouldn’t try to put the gift horse into the wood chipper.
Oil supported by the world's biggest military and huge subsidies.
It's why moving to renewables would be catastrophic for the US. And for all of the big Fossils, including Russia and the Saudis. And the smaller second-order beneficiaries like the UK who make money from "services" - moving the big money around and avoiding taxes on it.
We're in a messy transition to a post-fossil global economy. It's going to take decades, and it's not obvious how much will be left standing when it's over.
But one way or another, it's locked in and unavoidable.
If your currency is high value (which USD is due to demand in part due to oil and part due to others having reserves of it), foreign goods are cheap to you. This makes importing attractive, but it makes it very expensive for other countries to buy your exports.
If your currency has a lower value, it’s cheap for others to buy your exports, but expensive for you to import goods.
> If you actually wanted to bring manufacturing back to the US you'd figure out which industries you wanted to develop, probably subsidise them, communicate very clearly what you were going to do and then ratchet up the tariffs on those specific finishes products, whilst being sure to maintain access to raw materials and components you still needed.
I'm not here to defend the current approach, but what you're describing sounds like a centrally planned communist / state-directed economy or something. Is that really the way forward?
The whole idea of the government bringing manufacturing back to the US is central planning. The free market approach is to remove barriers to trade and let things develop as they may.
> The free market approach is to remove barriers to trade and let things develop as they may.
And the events of the last 30-40 years have shown why this is a beyond foolish approach. The 47th and MAGA didn't rise out of nothing, they rose out of the economic devastation brought upon by completely unchecked turbo-capitalism.
Conversely the Chinese government has split their economy into 50% privately owned and 50% state owned, which has fueled decades of rapid and consistent economic growth, so much so that the current administration now views China as our primary strategic and economic rival.
> what you're describing sounds like a centrally planned communist / state-directed economy or something. Is that really the way forward?
What they are describing is basically what every sane government does, and what the US used to do until, er, a few months ago.
If you consider most western countries to be centrally planned communist states (including the US up until very recently), then I don't have anything else to argue.
You may think this is fair, while others disagree. As there's no "world government" arbiter for these kinds of actions, there are only the actions your country takes, and the actions other sovereign countries take in response - for example, all countries in the world could ban import of anything produced by your burgeoning state-aid factories, leaving you with only a domestic market to sell to; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy)#Anti-...
Fun part is, the USA and some other nations of 1947 realized that free markets needed some kind of "universal arbiter" to curb such shenanigans and brought the World Trade Organization (originally GATT, WTO since 1995, not affiliated with the UN) on the way. Most of you probably heard of it.
Virtually all the world's nations are voluntary members. Sure, many criticize it for being a tool of the USA and other western nations to browbeat other nations into shape (e.g. China). There is merit to this claim, but obviously it is not so clear-cut. However, it can't be denied that the WTO has been a tremendously useful tool for the USA and its allies to shape world trade. Somehow the 45th president of the USA thought the USA would get the short end of the stick here and started to obstruct WTO proceedings in 2018. The WTO has lost a lot of its influence since then, removing a powerful tool from the USA's arsenal.
I think this is the root of the disconnect. A lot of people say "wait, Americans wanted X because it's a useful tool for projecting American power" - whether X is the petrodollar, the WTO, free trade, whatever. But largely it was one segment of Americans that wanted and benefited from it.
As a comparison, Maggie Thatcher imported communist Polish coal in the 1980s and just stopped paying British miners. It saved the country a fortune - it got the same quality and amount of coal for far less money - and sent entire segments of the country into a death spiral from which they'd never recover.
Similarly, the windfall of finding oil off the coast of Scotland in the 1970s made fat stacks of cash for Britain. Maggie Thatcher did not spend that on deindustrialising Scotland. She did not spend it, like the Norwegians, on a sovereign wealth fund that would benefit everyone in the country. Instead, she spent it on revitalising the old docklands of London, and now they're the epicentre of high finance, where the UK makes most of its money in financial services -- mainly for the people who work in that industry, and the South East of England where they live.
These choices ruined the lives of large swathes of the country. But they hugely benefitted the country overall. Were they good choices or not?
Please, give me some credit. Who assumes that any nation's population, or any sufficiently large group of people, really, is a homogeneous, uniform, or monolithic in their opinions? I certainly don't.
Sure, but the point is that a wide spectrum of people, particularly on the left, believed so strongly that WTO was such a net negative for the average American they were willing to violently riot over it.
So when we talk about “a useful tool” in the American toolbox, we should keep in mind that tool mostly, or at least has the perception, of benefiting only the rich.
> You may think this is fair, while others disagree.
I said nothing about fairness. What I said is that every government and some point or another makes use of protectionist economic measures.
> for example, all countries in the world could ban import of anything produced by your burgeoning state-aid factories
This just doesn't happen, at least not for the reasons you mentioned.
China is a good example, as it gives many forms of subsidies to its industries. Other countries respond with a mix of measures to protect the industries they care about.
When I hear about the concept of central planning, it tends to remind me of a mathematician named Leonid Kantorovich I had read about in a textbook. I am not too familiar with the economics concepts that he might have run into, but this article [1] is pretty interesting in regards to how centrally planned socialist economies also need to use the idea of interest rates and prices like capitalist ones.
If you do this to the entire economy, yes sure, fair. If you decide that you want Americans to eat American garlic and you give garlic farmers a tax break or grants to buy seed and fertilizer I wouldn't call that central planning. More "strategic investment".
Replace garlic with whatever industry it is that the gov wants to strategically invest in: semiconductors, automobiles, aerospace, weapons, renewable energy.
I dislike this sort of binary thinking. It's why we are having the problems we have.
Just because some industry gets subsidized and/or ran by the government, doesn't mean we are now all communists. Every government has SOME industry that is ultimately state ran. Fire departments, police, and education are prime examples of nearly universally state ran systems.
There are some industries that just, frankly, work better when state directed, not all of them, but a few. Private fire departments don't work, neither do private police departments.
This is not nor has it ever been an all or nothing thing.
If you're spending 3.5 years trying to "renegotiate a deal", you don't have a strategy to bring manufacturing back. If you change your policy multiple times in a week you don't even have a strategy.
Easier to onshore manufacturing with multi-year timelines, but you don't need multi-year timelines to impose tariffs on carefully selected industries, not penguins and your existing industries' key suppliers.
Well, if your goal is to pump and dump the stock markets, this is a strategy and it is working.
I don't think that the current administration has enough foresight to actually plan for such a scheme but I think they are smart enough to see an opportunity, to wit the posts on social media shortly before withdrawing some tariffs.
> This ignores the reality of power in the US. Presidents can't implement multi-decade initiatives.
Which is why if anyone wanted to actually bring manufacturing "back" to the US they would work with congress and pass laws that curtailed the tariff powers in a way that ensured that in the areas where you wanted long term investment the president would not have the power to change policy unilaterally. At which point the typical congressional gridlock would serve to ensure stability going forward and allow businesses to invest.
Presidents don't need multi-decade initiatives to be not so hopelessly inept at trade policy they end up hurting manufacturing rather than bringing it back.
Trump shouting about how his amazing tariffs are going to bring manufacturing back and then promptly cancelling most of them and bragging about how everyone wants to do deals with him and he's going to do beautiful deals isn't any kind of strategy for bringing manufacturing back, and frankly the fact that so many Americans are dumb or partisan enough to insist it is represents a bigger problem for US industrial policy than term limits
Meanwhile, every other country is also negotiating amongst themselves to remove any dependence on the US. Dealing with the US is only to soften the blow and buy time.
Nope, only the people defending the dumbest and most pointless act of economic vandalism in history.
In fact the only argument I can think of in favour of setting tariffs for the Heard and McDonald islands is that the average American that thinks that this level of attention to detail helps US manufacturing probably is less intelligent and capable than the penguins that live there....
> ... some were concerned about the law's provisions favoring American industry. ... the chairman of the 2023 G20 meeting in India, called it "the most protectionist act ever drafted in the world", asking American officials, "You believed in market forces and now you do this?" Other countries have begun to create their own similar laws. China requested WTO dispute consultations with the United States.
> 27 European Union finance ministers have expressed "serious concerns" about the financial incentives of the Inflation Reduction Act, and are considering challenging it. They have listed at least nine points in the legislation, which they say could be in breach of World Trade Organization rules. They were opposed to the subsidies for consumers to buy North American-assembled electric cars, as EU officials believe the subsidies discriminate against European carmakers. One EU official told CNBC that, "there is a political consensus (among the 27 ministers) that this plan threatens the European industry" and its supply of raw materials. In February 2023, the European Commission announced it would propose the "Net Zero Industrial Act", similar to the IRA, in turn putting pressure on the United Kingdom and South Korea.
In the mild sort of way. Mostly Biden didn’t change much and kept things stable (the way businesses like it), but there was definitely room in that for the CHIPs act, which is a double edged sword (by pushing China to invest more in its local chip production). He didn’t bother getting rid of the DJT tariffs that survived after COVID hit either.
This was the entire purpose of the CHIPS act. Biden just took some of the protectionist policies Trump started in his first term and did gave them an actual objective.
I don't think it's physically possible to move much manufacturing in that time. If you think it is, please give estimates in dollar values, number of jobs, and square footage of factory construction expected.
Previous government efforts do not need to be sabotaged every time there's an election. For example, when Biden came in he didn't immediately unwind all of Trump's industrial efforts. He kept the China tariffs, and built on top of them with the CHIPS act to add the "carrot" part of "carrot and stick".
The business decision of these tariffs very well be to just offshore American operations altogether. Better to keep most the world market and lose America. It's not a given businesses will choose to invest in an isolationist country even if they are from there if protectionist policies they may benefit from narrow their horizons.
Most of the demand (in terms of dollars/euros) is confined to the developed world. What happens when both US and EU want to bring back operations back to the home countries? Then these companies are left with serving less of the global demand.
If the tarrifs stay high, then US consumption will plummet since all goods will now be that much more expensive and people won't be able to afford as much.
If tariffs go down then moving manufacturing to the US was the losing choice for any company that chooses to do so.
Either way betting on current US consumption levels with US manufactured goods is a losing bet.
The backdoor is bringing heavily automated factories to the US. The viability of this might still be mixed right now, but at least in the future, even without tariffs, the golden goose of manufacturing is still "locally made by robots."
They invest in Africa and Southeast Asia, and everywhere else that isn’t American/Western Europe, and create demand that way. What do you Xi has been doing for the last 10+ years with Silk Road? China already had a plan for this trade war.
China is essentially acting like a VC fund. They spread money around everywhere... and get a ton of benefits in return. Local autocrats just love China because their money doesn't come with strings attached (such as IWF or EU/US aid), they get to spend down a chunk of their massive dollar forex reserves, provide a ton of people from their poor provinces with work (Chinese foreign construction projects usually don't hire local labor!), and build up soft power in the population of the countries where they invest.
I'm hoping that wasn't a racist comment (that those other countries aren't worth it for some reason), I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. There is a lot of potential in emerging markets, potential that the Americans have ignored to their detriment (as we are experiencing now, we basically have no leverage over China because they expanded their markets enough over the course of a decade).
It's a reference to a movie called "Empire of Dust" where a chinese-led team has a hard time building infrastructure in Africa.
Whether or not some third world country is worth developing is an economic question, not a moral one. And even if it is, the question of whether or not you will be able to monetize that relationship by the end of it is another one. What the chinse are doing now is basically IMF-style debt trapping of other nations, which doesn't seem like a successful strategy historically.
The bottom line is that if the natives don't want to cooperate with whatever civilization you're building, it's not going to work out. Look at what happened to the USA in afganistan (and pretty much every empire that stepped foot in there). I don't think that's racist, I think it is pretty optimistic outlook towards the sovereignty of nations.
There is a really great movie called Bitter Lake about this, by Adam Curtis.
The Europeans seem to have become more free trade curious after recent events so this doesn't seem like it will hold up as a "what if". And I expect that the coming months of US-only inflation are just going to confirm that position for them even i they face a mild recession due to US market access/demand collapse issues.
The EU has always been on the side of free trade (agreements with Turkiye, Canada, Japan, Mercosur, the failed TTIP etc have been worked on for many years).
But it's also always been protective of the internal market and e.g. added tariffs on Chinese steel recently.
Only about 1B people in EU+US. Majority of people only need one phone. If I were a cell manufacturer, I'd drive down costs to service the other 7B people.
Of course, you won't make the same margins as EU+US business. Not sure if that is enough incentive to onshore consumer manufacturing.
The margins get really thin after the first 2 billion or so. Middle income globally is ~10-20 PPP dollars a day and that's only ~17% of the world's population. They're generally radically different phones between markets too no one's really dominating the cheap phone market.
The margins are only thin if you're used to 40% as Apple has been. They're not at all so thin that the rest of the pack aren't making actual profit filling the gap for the other 7B people who aren't well off westerners.
Sure, but say it is: you assume a long-term trade barrier with China, invest in US factories and employee training, bring folks in from outside, start your production, get some competitive wins in the domestic (but obviously not international!) electronics market...
Then some future administration decides on detent and signs a free trade agreement to open markets or whatnot, yada yada. China marches right in and eats your lunch. Again.
Trade barriers do not do anything to address fundamental inequities in production efficiency. To be blunt: China is great at making electronics not because they have all the talent. They have all the talent because China is poor, still. The US is not (though it looks like we're aiming that way). Ergo Chinese production efficiency will be higher.
What trade barriers with China actually do isn't to bring manufacturing back to the US, of course. It's to move production from China to Vietnam or the Philippines or India or wherever isn't tariffed. Then of course we'll need to apply tariffs to them, and so on.
Doesn't need to move production to Vietnam. Needs to move finished product to Vietnam and replace "Made in China" sticker with "Made in Vietnam" one.
As to the poor part, after Xi is done with dumping treasuries, and subsequent US default and USD cratering, the salaries would be on par on both sides of the ocean (as they should be).
Which would also automatically solve the illegal immigration problem. And fentanyl problem (no money no honey).
> They have all the talent because China is poor, still.
That’s why China has (somewhat) inexpensive labor. It does not explain why China has far more plastic engineering talent, electrical engineering talent, etc than the US.
They have more talent because that's where talent is needed. You don't staff factories with "talent", you staff them with labor. Then you need "talent" to design the process. It all feeds back. We used to have injection molding plastic experts in the US in the 70's! The technology was invented here. But they all retired and no one stepped in to replace them because those factories all closed down. Chinese kids picked up the slack.
The US wasn't sleeping though. We trained a generation of software engineering talent that remains the envy of the world. There are whole web sites devoted to this "Hacker" subculture, even. Maybe we can find one.
Seriously: there's no problem here. This is the way economies work.
China really isn’t that poor anymore. A lot of their recent productivity gains are coming from automation, and they are leaning into harder than the Japanese did in the 90s.
I'm going to push back a bit here: things are improving, and China is already as rich as Mexico...now I get that American's have a unjustly bad impression of Mexico because of poverty at the not very populated border, but Mexico isn't a poor country, nor is Thailand, etc...these are all middle income countries that are quickly approaching high income countries.
Having lived in China for 9 years, and left 9 years ago, I can't really justify calling China poor anymore. Ya, they have a huge rural area and they still have lots of poor people, but they have a huge middle class (even if it isn't a majority of the country) that can afford a lot of things.
Chinese wages remain about 6-10x lower than US workers expect for the same kind of job. Whether that's "poor" or not is arguable. There are much poorer nations. Nonetheless US wage levels simply aren't going to compete, and it isn't even close.
Right. When I was working in China, I was only making about half as much as I do now at Google. The gap is much smaller for SWEs, even my local colleagues weren't making much less than I did. China is definitely an upper middle-income country, officially and just by looking at the numbers. They are breaking into being a lower high-income country next, and the graph really isn't slowing down.
But they are going off a demographic cliff, and that is why they are investing heavily in automation. They just won't have the people to do this work in the future, and expanding abroad and investing in robots are the only options for them.
Since he's even taxing empty islands, I doubt the end result will be anything else than either not selling to the US or selling to the US with a grey market.
If you put tariffs on the whole world, it's basically the same thing as a global economic sanction, similar to what Russia suffered.
In addition, by definition if the only way to bring manufacturing back to the US is by putting up import barriers, it means US manufacturing isn't competitive, domestically or globally.
Unless there is some hunker down period of isolation that'll make US manufacturing globally competitive somehow, all this will do in the long run is either isolate US manufacturers to the domestic market, or provide a temporary advantage that will disappear the minute the barriers are dropped.
> That uncertainty does not create stable markets.
Stable markets with bad outcomes are not worth defending on stability alone.
> It does not create very accurate business decisions
The business environment is not great. It does seem some part of that is the result of cheap Chinese goods that have displaced labor _and_ environmental costs flooding foreign markets. That China even uses proxy countries to push out even more is instructive.
So, if not tariffs, then what should we use to solve this?
Not imposing ludicrous tariffs based on flawed economics on the entire world at once?
Not imposing tariffs with no warning on your closest allies and attempting to bully them into submission?
Not imposing huge tariffs on some of the weakest nations you trade with (e.g. Laos, Vietnam).
Not changing trade policy radically every few days and announcing it on social media?
Not crashing the stock market, announcing a reverse on your social media platform, then boasting about how much money your billionaire friends made?
Not calling one of your largest trading partners peasants and the then very clever, alternating between insults and praise like a two-bit mobster?
This administration has made America a laughing stock; I don’t think many Americans realise just how much trust has been burned with allies since ‘liberation day’.
The simple fact Trump was voted in again denotes that the people of the US is not to be trusted.
At this point, it doesn't matter if Trump disappears into a void at the end of his term.
22% of people in the US voted directly for Trump. That's 22% of people that think his mode of operating is great presidential material.
I cannot trust doing business in a society with such a large proportion of either idiocy or malice, which includes wealthy and influential individuals!
The last 15 years has changed the fundamental stereotype of a US citizen. And while I personally know a few US citizens who are trustworthy, competent, lovely people, this marks an inherent bias in decision making.
From here, whatever Trump does is simply reinforcing the stereotype.
> The simple fact Trump was voted in again denotes that the people of the US is not to be trusted.
That might be the read, but it was people who were not happy with their lot in life and just saw same old same old as options while Trump was different. People in the US mostly don't think about the EU.
While I'd like to think lessons are learned, they swallowed/supported outrageous claims up to this point.
Cognitive dissonance suggests they have to keep supporting the current regime and whatever it says,because to change their mind is to realise the horror of what they've done.
Some Hacker News types like to bury their head in the sand when inconvenient political news occurs but to say this happened without warning simply flags you as part of this group.
> on some of the weakest nations you trade with (e.g. Laos, Vietnam).
There is room for these countries to buy more American goods. These two countries also rebadge and ship out a lot of Chinese goods to evade tariffs.
> changing trade policy radically every few days and announcing it on social media?
So, do you want warnings, or not?
> Not crashing the stock market, announcing a reverse on your social media platform, then boasting about how much money your billionaire friends made?
If you didn't make any trades during this period how was your portfolio actually impacted? I would assume this is the majority of non billionaire investors. So the only ones who lost in the crash were the same billionaires.
> calling one of your largest trading partners peasants and the then very clever, alternating between insults and praise like a two-bit mobster?
Does that trading partner also act like a two bit mobster? If so, wouldn't this just be turnabout, or why is deference to hostile economic partners justified?
> has made America a laughing stock
That's an absurdly biased point of view.
> I don’t think many Americans realise just how much trust has been burned with allies since ‘liberation day’.
Not much. They didn't actually "trust" us before. I'm not sure how you'd measure that anyways. From my reading of foreign news they're mostly taking it in stride, having seen this coming since last year, and not being particularly surprised by it. This zeitgeist only exists in half of America right now.
>They didn't actually "trust" us before. I'm not sure how you'd measure that anyways. From my reading of foreign news they're mostly taking it in stride, having seen this coming since last year, and not being particularly surprised by it. This zeitgeist only exists in half of America right now.
It's hard for me to overstate how wrong this is. In my country Denmark, everyone, everywhere is talking about this and people are generally worried. I hear it in the supermarkets.
We absolutely did trust the US until now. For instance, the entire Danish public sector runs on Microsoft. Nobody ever considered that to be an issue. Now there is political talk about how that can be undone. Several of my peers who read HN and considered US-based, YC-backed to be the ultimate way to launch a startup are talking about the liability involved. Mind you, this is not the typical "I hate America!" rhetoric that has always existed to some degree everywhere, this is risk management: "Can I trust that the US is stable enough for me to bet on?"
You may not think it matters because the US is as strong as it is, or maybe you don't care. But the trust and thereby soft power that has been destroyed in these few months is generational.
> It's a simple formula based on balance of trade.
It certainly is simple.
> Does that trading partner also act like a two bit mobster?
The US is comparable to the dictatorship of Xi now? I suppose the new leadership style is similar.
> From my reading of foreign news…
The very high level of these tariffs and their global scope and speed of imposition was a huge surprise to (former) US allies, and even to many in the US.
> It's a simple formula based on balance of trade.
"Simple" is why it put 10% on an island with no humans and no manmade structures separately to the country which owns that island, and also tariffed another island that's technically British but which the British leased to the US military.
"Simple" isn't what you want to decide a complex trade policy for a complex economy.
> That's an absurdly biased point of view.
Hello, I'm in one of those foreign allies. We are, in fact, laughing at USA for shooting itself in the foot like this. On the other hand, the bit where Trump is also refusing to rule out military force to annex some of us? We take that seriously.
> Not much. They didn't actually "trust" us before. I'm not sure how you'd measure that anyways.
We used to hold the US in high regard. "Leaders of the free world" etc.
But also, relatively stable economic position, stable currency, reliable government that repaid debts, etc.
Even though Trump 1 happened, we knew it would come to an end, and we thought you would finally be over it — especially given how it ended.
Now, we don't. And many of us will be looking to China as a more reliable (for us) trading partner.
* Lower corporate income tax to the global minimum of 15%
* Reshoring incentives
* Regulatory reform to remove barriers to building things
* Strict export controls around AI, robotics, and fusion
* Massive subsides for production of useful humanoid robots and deployment of useful fusion power generation
To the extent that tariffs are considered at all, it should only be if they're implemented with bipartisan support, selective with specific strategic goals in mind, gradually phased in, and explicitly long-term policy. Extreme tariffs without clear staying power are just disruptive for no good reason. They won't change business behavior; they'll just temporarily jack up costs, create an unnecessary customs backlog, and roadblock some commercial activities entirely.
Even if implemented carefully, I would argue that tariffs in general are counterproductive in the long run. If a domestic industry isn't internationally competitive, the goal should be to fix that, not insulate it from competition.
> So, if not tariffs, then what should we use to solve this?
I’d argue that tariffs that increase at a known rate are better than surprise large ones. Even a 1% increase a week every Monday for a year lets everyone’s supply chain adjust gradually. You’ll know within a few weeks how your product is affected and you’ll plan for the increase over the year. That’s probably still too fast though, since factories take time to build and the whole point is to encourage local manufacturing. Given the 4 year term trump could have gone for 3 years of increases with the hope that companies would start building factories and have them running by year 4.
Maybe start with smaller tariffs and go from there. But its not even worth defending current administration policies. Its either completely stupid or deliberately malevolent.
There is a deluge of experts in economics and other fields who clearly state this is not the right approach to bringing manufacturing to the US. Why wouldn't we trust experts in their fields?
That probably means its not a good strategy. Look at business activity, people are comparing it to early covid business conditions but its entirely self inflicted. You don't need to be an expert to see this is a failure. The assumption shouldn't be that Trump is acting in the interest of the average American or the American government.
If an entrepreneur is smart enough to figure out how to land a rocket ship on its feet, that person can figure out how to manufacture printed circuit boards economically in the US.
I'll add that the elites who pushed for earlier trade deals often did it specifically to get rich selling off America's domestic manufacturing and many jobs. Now, countries like China have them.
So, Trump's policies should be seen as an attempt to reverse for Americans' benefit damaging policies from before which are still active. Now, whether that will do good or harm in the long term is anyone's guess. We already see companies investing more in American infrastructure, though.
As one of the “skilled electronics engineers” in the US you could count on US soil (whatever that means) I can tell you this article reads very strangely to a EE.
“we were able to take all those designs and spin up our own SMT, it's called Surface Mount Technology”
“run that through our surface mount technology by our line operators”
“meaning the printed circuit board or PCBA assembly”
So, he’s definitely not an EE. No EE talks like this when they are trying to explain the nuts and bolts to a lay person. Either that or the editor took liberties they shouldn’t have.
It's a transcript of an informal podcast interview with - clearly - a marketing guy who may or may not have 'engineer' in his title.
I've worked with dozens of guys like this over the years. They could elegantly bullshit their way through any discussion. They had an answer for every question, even when they didn't.
There's a reason they don't send the design engineers to trade shows.
Steve Jobs was one of these people. A clever marketing guy who relied on others for technical heavy lifting. I suggest going back and re-watching some of his presentations, like the unveiling of the iPhone. Every word he said was meticulously planned and very rehearsed.
Not that any of that matters, because engineering is a team sport, and that's where taking this too literally becomes a problem. Just how like a football team is made up of different skills and varying physical builds. The reason they don't send the design engineers to the conventions is because they are too honest and will spill the beans on the product's shortcomings, or inundate the customer with irrelvant details.
> * Steve Jobs was one of these people. A clever marketing guy who relied on others for technical heavy lifting. I suggest going back and re-watching some of his presentations, like the unveiling of the iPhone. Every word he said was meticulously planned and very rehearsed.*
Before Apple entered its iPod era, Jobs could do a reasonable job of taking questions from a technical audience
No single person on this planet can know everything about a product as complex as a phone or any other modern device, and the expectation of some people form execs even ones who were engineers is simply unrealistic.
If you know everything about your product down to the most low level technical detail your product is either a brick (and I think that even that is too complicated) or you greatly overestimate what you actually know.
> because they are too honest and will spill the beans on the product's shortcomings, or inundate the customer with irrelvant details
Yeah, getting upset an EE who has the skills to build a cellphone from scratch isn't actually moonlighting as a writer doing a blogspam version of a podcast interview fits that quite well
Steve Jobs was not a marketing guy. If anything, he was a designer. His technical knowledge was also way beyond most CEOs. He designed his presentations with a high attention to detail just like he designed his products, product ranges and companies. If you watch any one of the many interviews he gave you'll see that he can talk off-the-cuff, in depth on all kinds of subjects. And, unlike many modern CEOs, he pauses to think before opening his mouth.
Steve Jobs was one of these people. A clever marketing guy who relied on others for technical heavy lifting.
That's the currently-fashionable revisionist history. But the truth of the matter, from his contemporaries, was that he knew is stuff. He was also good at marketing.
I suggest going back and re-watching some of his presentations,
I suggest going back and re-reading some of the print interviews he gave to technical publications. There's no question he knew what he was talking about.
> But the truth of the matter, from his contemporaries, was that he knew is stuff.
Read anything on folklore.org, and you can see that's not really the case. He prescribes a lot of stuff that they just had to get around, typical pointy haired boss stuff.
I think that's a very myopic view of what Jobs did. I am of the opinion he was one of the greatest designers of all time.
Just because he didn't move pixels across the screen doesn't mean he wasn't setting the design language, defining taste, sweating detail and holding the vision. No-one would suggest that a show-runner didn't make TV, or that a director wasn't a filmmaker. Jony Ive's design changed (and improved) immensely one he was working closely with Jobs. Once Jobs was gone things drifted. Similarly Pixar was hyper-focused under Jobs then began to drift as soon as he was no longer involved.
Visionary and Product Designer are different jobs. Generalize them as the same thing if you like, but he was a CEO and a visionary. He didn't design products, he criticized and made demands of the designers.
You're just jealous. These guys have spun up their own RoHS and are doing a 100% EDA automation with full Verilog over there. By doing the reflow process (it's a way of building integrated circuits) they're able to offer complete impedance right here in the USA.
Before retirement my father was employed in a company certifying medical devices.
Half the descriptions provided by those who made the devices were this sort of word salad because they concerned products which were obvious scams[0].
On person in particular was editing the description on the fly and was looking for a word so dad jokingly suggested "impedance". "Yes, thank you!" replied that person - her face lighting up as she added the word.
[0] Like a vacuum cleaner which was supposed to dispense a mist of medication. Initially rejected as there was no dosage control whatsoever, but I heard that eventually somehow it was certified.
It's a complex problem, there's a lot of resistance from consumers who react badly to the price of domestic goods. Maybe tariffs will induce more demand, but I'm not sure the capacity is there in the first place.
It's not really a problem of "resistance", it's more about purchasing power, common and avoiding feeling ripped off.
People buy stuff competitively and that's it. There are modifiers, notably being rich enough that regular items prices make no difference to you, so you can buy all from your own country without affecting you too much.
But even if you are middle class, buying most items at a higher price just because they are from your country is just a waste of money from an individual utilitarian point of view.
It directly affects people and they always favor that, even if in the long run doing so might have a second order effect that will affect them in worse ways.
Tariffs, taxations and special legislation is actually the only way to make some product competitive for your own country. Especially when they are a participant in the trade willing to take a hit just to corner the market. This is basically what China did for many things, so here we are...
Not sure watt you guys are on about. Not to be too negative here or polarise the debate, but I remember the electrifying experience as a child to source local products instead of relying on imports from faraday countries. I guess technology has lost some of its radiance and has just become a mains to an end, to feed the addiction.
I'm hoping it induces the reversal in reckless culture of consumption and waste and longer end-product life cycles on the companies that design and manufacture them.
You're mixing your processes - is he making his own circuit boards (reflow) or making his own chips (verilog) - and I have no idea what "complete impedance" even means in this context - HN really needs to stop AI posting here
We really should not be doing jokes like this in times like these where the US president makes those kinds of remarks on a daily basis while being 100% serious
There's a somewhat better discussion of this phone here.[1] At least the making of the board.
Board manufacture, SMT pick and place, and soldering are all automated, and the equipment is widely available. Everybody does boards roughly the same way.
The assembly problems in phones come from all the non-board parts.
See this iPhone teardown.[2] Look at all those little subassemblies. Some are screwed down. Some use elastic adhesive. Some are held in place by other parts. They're connected by tiny flexible printed circuits. That's the labor-intensive part. Usually involves lots of people with tweezers and magnifiers. They don't show that.
So here's that part of assembly in a phone factory in India.[3] Huge workforce.
For comparison, here's a Samsung plant.[4] More robots, fewer people. Samsung made something like 229 million phones in 2024. If a US company produced phones at Samsung volumes, the price would come down.
There's another way to do it. Here's a teardown of a classic Nokia "brick" phone.[1] That's designed for automated low-cost vertical assembly. The case provides the basic structure, and everything can be put into the case with a vertical push. There are no internal wires to connect. There are simple machines for that kind of assembly. Then everything gets squeezed together, and you have a hard block of an object that's hard to damage.
If you can design something which can be assembled in that simple way, high-volume manufacturing can be automated cheaply. Smartphones are not built from parts intended to be assembled in that way, but that's a decision based on cheap labor, not one that's inherent in smartphone design.
Design for assembly was more of a thing when manufacturing was in the US. The Macintosh IIci was designed for vertical assembly. Everything installed with a straight-down move. The power supply outputs were stakes that engaged clips on the motherboard. No internal wiring.
The trade-off of the current smartphone assembly process (many parts and many steps) is driven by numerous factors, including cheap labor. It also considers: incremental design improvement, testing, defects, supply chain, model differenciation, ...
"but that's a decision based on cheap labor, not one that's inherent in smartphone design"
This is the heart of the matter. The US has abandoned skills because cheap labor in Asia. An example from the story about dealing with touch screen tests: they're employing disposable workers to toy with pinch and zoom testing; something easily automated with a simple machine and image comparisons. How sad. This is an actual regression in technology.
If the US wants to get manufacturing back, the only areas that matter are electronics and, to a lesser extent, machinery. See this chart.[1] That's an achievable goal.
Here's a useful smartphone that could become big:
- Solid state battery that will last at least 5 years.
- 5 year full warranty.
- No connectors. Inductive charging only.
- Screen as unbreakable as possible.
- Sealed unit. No holes in case. Filled with inert gas at factory.
Then Tim Cook gave up on manufacturing. Which was how it saved Apple.
Steve Jobs always had a somewhat fantasise vision of dark factory. He wasn't able to accomplish that when Apple was still fighting for survival. But now Apple has more cash then it knows what to do with it.
a bit of the problem is that modern elements like display + touch screen require a lot more bandwidth than 3110 - for example the displays require ridiculous bandwidth in comparison to the nokia, like 10 gigabit/s for Samsung Galaxy S25 (basic model, not plus/ultra), plus connectors for the cameras.
At the very least you can't really make the screen soldered-on, and the simple connectors used in Nokia might not work out for such high bandwidth use case. Same with cameras.
Thin ribbon connectors are one of the hardest things to automate from what I remember regarding Sony's efforts to automate PS5 manufacture.
> If a US company produced phones at Samsung volumes, the price would come down.
The problem is, there are no Western manufacturers left that have the brand loyalty to bring such a large volume of purchases to the table.
The giants are so giant, it's almost impossible to compete with them in the consumer mass market. The only way you can outcompete the giants is by focusing on tiny small niches where consumers are willing and able to pay a premium - the government (auditable supply chains) and eco-progressives. That's where Tesla started, that's where Purism and Frame.work live.
Your scenario is more like a best-case option, actually. I mean currently there are only 13M people employed in manufacturing in the US [0], while output is at an all time high [1]. The vast majority of this manufacturing is dependent on components imported from other countries - which just got much more expensive. So even if employment in manufacuturing would increase by 20% (unrealistic IMO), that would only translate to 2.6M people - while at the same time losing multiples of that in better-paid jobs in other industries, mostly services.
I think you might even lose a bunch of these jobs, at least in the short term, as businesses now need to free up money (they likely hadn't planned to initially) to pay for tariffs before their goods / parts are auctioned off at the port. That's even before consumer spending tightens up due to rising prices, and declining stocks.
Pretty much guaranteed. The goal of modern automation isn't more people it's less. People love to spout "but the industrial revolution just made people able to do more jobs". But the goal of modern automation is to _replace all jobs_ that it can.
Then you hire 4 guys to maintain all the automation between 5 factories they drive between as needed.
Yes, that's what civilization -> industrialization -> automation does: eliminate jobs, which opens up opportunities for new jobs.
you are no longer an animal spending most of your waking life searching for food, nor do you build your own shelter, make your own clothes, construct tools, etc
yes, automation seeks to eliminate factory jobs, most of them are pretty awful anyway. this opens up new options as every step along the way always has
and yes, the change isn't always easy for the folks that have to find something new
The goal isn’t actually specifically employment increases, that’s mostly a marketing strategy, the real goal is national security. US, Japan, and South Korea seem to have decided enough is enough with Chinese aspirations and threats to Taiwan, so US has convinced them to build additional capacity in the US and also to have those nations increase defense spending. Notice Japan has started joining NATO command and participating in NATO missions. I predict Japan will the be first “deal” announced by Trump administration, with South Korea soon afterwards. It makes sense for these allies, the logic is we should fortify our supply lines building redundant facilities in US homeland which is much harder for China to disrupt and attack, you guys start buying lots of F-47s, we start massive ship building, re-industrialize as rapidly as possible. Then should China try anything and somehow mess you guys up, the US will come back a get you out of it.
That would be sane, but it makes no sense then why Trump is threatening tarrifs on Canada or the EU - both places that also need to do the same. (move manufacturing out of China)
Sure it does. The strategy is based on chaos and reminding all the world, allies included that the US is in charge and they want some very specific changes from both Canada and EU, they need them to militarize quickly, the US military is furious that all their allies appear to be almost incapable, very little naval power specifically. I’d even argue the implied threat to leave NATO, the talk of annexation of Canada and Greenland, it’s all strategic psychological warfare on allies to shock them into action … and it’s working … take a look a Germany’s new military budget and plans. There is also an intentional devaluation of the dollar to assist in re-industrialization. This is all national security and world order driven, not economics, and it’s actually the optimal time during a strong domestic US economy to try to make these changes.
It's national security to destroy all of your alliances? In that case, what is the reason Russia is exempt from these tariffs? Reverse-psychological warfare?
First of all there is (EDIT: almost) zero trade between the US and Russia currently, same with North Korea. (EDIT: perhaps some token signal of wanting to negotiate over Ukraine? or perhaps even more “sinister” - getting US political opposition to falsely argue Trump is a Russian agent and make themselves look silly)
Second, yes part of the strategy is to force allies to self assess themselves and their dependence on US power. Trump and Nixon had a personal relationship and his fundamental strategy in business is based on creating uncertainty, it’s literally like point 1 of his “Art of the Deal” and however another part of that strategy is being willing to walk away.
We are living through a turning point in history where current US administration has reversed the open policy to China and for national security reasons are working to re-industrialize and militarize quickly as a strategy to deter Chinese ambitions.
It’s fine to disagree and argue the neoliberalism strategy of globalism isn’t dead but politically it is. Of course that world order is fighting to survive where it can, UK, France, Germany all putting up resistance to the rise of neo-mercantilism and nationalism but we will see if canceling elections, restrictions on speech and jailing politicians will work to block it.
Maybe one change, but there is far too much going on and thus diverting attention. Pick something and fix it, not a million things and divide your attention and thus get nothing done. (not that other presidents were better, but part of that is good change is slow in many cases)
I don't buy that [3] is bad and [4] is good examples. That Samsung plant reel doesn't show the same parts of assembly as the first one - I bet those videos are just focusing on different parts of fundamentally identical factories.
I was going to skip this article until I read your post, it got me curious. You're totally right, it does read really weird. It made me laugh a bit, I needed that this morning. Thanks!
I have also "spun up my own SMT". It's a 50 USD hot air rework station and maybe 20$ of consumables in a 4 meter square workshop (I live in Asia). It would be challenging, but possible, for me to assemble the PCBs in their photographs by hand. There are indeed a lot of people like me.
He certainly meant an "SMT line", because phones assembled on a manual station in the USA (outside of shit quality) would cost well in excess of $2000.
They might, if their expectations are as simple as an on ramp to better or more stable things. It would also make sense for those who are using this method for career change.
I have a coworker who "couldn't hack it" as a paralegal and is now working in the line for server assembly. Or another coworker who came from a major daytrading firm to work quality control with me.
That’s not what they do. As Tim Cook said multiple times the engineers are needed as floor and line managers, to coordinate parts of the process, to set up new lines quickly etc… those are not the ones doing the actual soldering.
It extrapolates broadly. It's kind of a funny thing. When somebody doesn't know much about something but wants to pretend they do, their vocabulary comes off sounding like a thesaurus of vernacular, but when you speak to somebody who genuinely knows something, to the point of having an intuitive feeling/understanding of it, they could easily explain, at least roughly, even the most esoteric topic in a relatable enough language that a high schooler could understand.
Space stuff is another domain that's just chock full of this.
I don't think this is true. Knowing something well and being able to explain it in simple terms are unrelated skills. Plenty of people who know their domain super well just can't explain to lay person.
The interviewee is described as "Purism's founder", who even says "we took our own electronics engineers (EEs)", implying (though not explicitly stating) he doesn't include himself in that category.
I do think there's an interesting conversation to have here though about workforce management, as someone who lives in adjacent worlds.
If you are long term greedy, like China, a great strategy to capture dominance of a discipline would be along the lines of how to boil a frog. Start by sending grad students to the top universities, ensuring they work for the PIs for cheap, bring as many of them back to China as you can, but tolerate a leaky return path so as not to stir up notice. Advertize their high post-training employment rate back to the universities to keep their valves open even as you start developing your universities internally, and eventually throttle down the outbound grad student pipeline. At some point after it's too late, the top universities, and their countries, look around, bemoan the lack of people in their discipline, and then just give up because by now they're old and tired.
Seems like something that has happened in chemistry, physics, and EE for sure. Once you start thinking this way, all sorts of things start making sense. Like maybe they looked at solar as a cheap, low threat point of entry for developing silicon fabrication capabilities. Software engineering, being a relatively soft skill, comes along for the ride.
Not sure about other fields, but if AI can take on a rapidly increasing set of fields, you start seeing this as how China primarily harvests not IP but workforce training from the global West, then technologies happen to fall out, then one day China has solved for their own graying work force at the same time they've solved for global economic dominance.
And a non-trivial contributor was the US governments (I blame the states too) defunding education.
This is an interesting suggestion. I'm curious what you mean by "sending grad students to top universities":
1.) the target universities have to accept the students, right?
2.) This implies some top-level RTS-game-esque control of the grad students when, in reality, they're making independent choices (albeit influenced by many factors, including govt promotion)
3.) Seems like the rational decision for ambitious grad students is to apply to said top universities (which may just happen to be abroad).
Same for "bringing many of them back": I read it at first like it was akin to some sort of spy agent network when in reality "bringing back" probably means various incentives, not some forced thing. Carrot, instead of stick.
1) target universities have to accept the students
Yes! Which the US incentivizes by a) underfunding K-12 education, reducing the internal applicant pool, b) competing grants in a way that incentivizes PIs to grasp for cheap labor. Additionally, the individual states also incentivize this. Look at the UC's own statistics: since 2009 the highest chance of acceptance goes to foreign, ethnically Asian applicants. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20321493
2) RTS-game-esque control of the grad students
Yes! Having been in the room when one of those grad students got a very stressful call from home (like broke down crying multiple times), it's definitely not all carrots. And the removal of carrots eventually looks like a stick.
3) Seems like the rational decision for ambitious grad students
A quick Google search shows that there are somewhere in the range of 20,000 electrical engineers who graduate US universities every year. Even if not all of them do electronics, and not all of the ones are considered “skilled” (by this author’s definition), there are not a “countable” amount.
My read on this that they don't mean EEs as in IEEE, but "engineer" as in "sanitation engineer", i.e. people who assemble electronic devices in factories.
I suspect this is a case of Gell-Mann amnesia. This article is not inconsistent with the quality of articles in blogs, the news etc. I believe you (And I) notice this due to expertise in the area.
Interesting. It is impressive that they almost managed to do 100% made in the USA, judging by the "Table of Origin". However the table doesn't really cover all the details down to the components, so I'm wondering where he sourced every small details.
He did include one paragraph on the website:
"Individual components used in fabrication are sourced direct from chip makers and parts distributors."
Todd Weaver is vastly exaggerating how special, innovative, and skilled Librem is. Their components are largely sourced from overseas, through domestic distributors, which is the norm for electronics manufacturers; overseas distributors are often precluded from international sales by agreements with their suppliers. There are also far more skilled electronics designers in the USA than he seems to think.
Source: I am an embedded developer, who works on a research, design, and development team which includes electronics engineers, and works on products manufactured in the same facility.
> There are also far more skilled electronics designers in the USA than he seems to think.
Second this. The Liberty Phone PCBA isn't even that exotic as far as modern designs go. The NXP SoC (CPU) it uses is a common part with a rather pedestrian ball pitch. A board like this is within the reach of countless trained EEs here, but they're usually happily employed at companies with higher volumes and margins. This often translates to a perception that they don't exist in the US market when low-budget companies go looking.
I thought the phrasing of "western distributor" was shady. I'm like doesn't that just mean the person ordering and distrusting the parts is "in the west" (not even necessarily US) but the parts could be from anywhere? It's not saying much at all.
>"Individual components used in fabrication are sourced direct from chip makers and parts distributors."
I suspect most of those are from overseas. A lot of that stuff just isn't made in the US. I don't know why they are shady about it, they should just be honest and denote which stuff isn't available at all in the US and which stuff isn't available at reasonable costs in the US.
> It has 4 GB of memory, and reviewers say that its specs are pretty outdated.
In my imaginary world, I wish someone stood up to this type of insanity. This would be a good time to force Apple / Google to revive old devices and allow the supply chains to adjust manufacturing things outside of China while the rest of the world pauses and lives with some outdated hardware technology. I know this is probably not feasible because Apple and Google probably survive on selling of new phones, but hey I can at least dream!
In this case, part of the criticism is that the phone doesn't function well. Even when it was new, it was slow and clunky, and the issue seemed to be the CPU wasn't up to the task. They may have optimized it a bit since, but fundamentally they chose an under-powered CPU to hit certain open source requirements.
I agree though that for many things (such as their laptop), specs often don't matter. Either I need a high-end, GPU accelerated computer, or I need a terminal. Having the newest CPU doesn't matter if it achieves other desired goals.
> and the issue seemed to be the CPU wasn't up to the task.
This is definitely not true, the issue is in the non-optimized software. I tried SXMo [0] on a Pinephone (which is much slower than the Librem), and it was unbelievably fast, including watching videos and looking a maps in a split-screen mode, simultaneously and smoothly. Android had 10 years and a huge team of developers to optimize the UI.
Sxmo is based on a keyboard-driven tiling window manager. Yes, it is as bad as it sounds. Touch gestures suck so much[1] that the most comfortable way to navigate it is with the volume buttons and power button. Each of these buttons has like 3 different functions with double, tripple click etc. Changing the volume is not one of the functions[2].
Auto screen orientation only works 50% of the time, because the whole thing is based on a pile of shell scripts.
Are you going to use a 10 years old phone just because it still receives software updates? If so, good for you, but overwhelming majority of people will opt buying a new one.
Why buy a new phone when old one still receives updated and has a working battery? Honest question, I only replaced my old phone because it stopped getting security updated. Up to some limit, ancient nokia wouldn't work well, but i would gladly use my pixel from 2018.
What's the point in buying a new phone when the old one works flawlessly and continues to receive not only security updates but also all software improvements, and is getting more optimized and fast with time? Sent from my Librem 5.
There are plenty of EEs in the good ol' US of A, they're just working as software engineers at the moment out of necessity, since there aren't really any EE jobs here, outside the defense sector and a few large companies.
But that is beside the point since it's not "EE" that's being done in China. It's manufacturing and assembly of US designs. And that is where there's real shortage - skilled labor that can do that. The actual work is mostly done by robots, but before it _is_ done by robots, manufacturing capacity needs to be designed and built. Under the best circumstances (e.g. unlimited Apple resources in India) this takes years.
From the article: "If you scoured the United States, you would be able to probably actually still count the number of skilled electronics engineers. If you go to Shenzhen, there's floor after floor after floor after floor of skilled EE's"
I don't even think it's the cost. The actual formerly labor-intensive work is mostly done by robots now (save for e.g. the garment industry which is still only very partially automated). It's just that anything in the physical world takes time and effort. As software engineers we're used to quick iteration cycles in everything. It might not seem to you that they are "quick", but compared to the physical world they are. I was first exposed to this when I worked for a "mostly hardware" company that also designs chips. They were going to introduce some features into the chips that I needed on the software side, and when asked about the timeline they said "3-4 years". Not a typo. That's how it is in hardware. I have no reason to believe that the timelines are substantially shorter in large scale high tech manufacturing - it's just the nature of the thing. You fuck something up, you can't just patch it, you have to re-do it, and that takes time and $$$.
Be all of that as it may, we still _have_ to revitalize the "real" segment of our industry, no matter the cost.
> As software engineers we're used to quick iteration cycles in everything. It might not seem to you that they are "quick", but compared to the physical world they are.
That's also partly because (physical world) engineers don't invest the same intense effort to enable quick iteration cycles for their area as software engineers do. I cannot say whether this is a "culture problem" of engineering disciplines, or managers don't see a huge economic value that this would enable, and thus don't allow engineers to work on such topics.
I at least somewhat know what I am talking about, since when I had to get used to some CAD program, I really felt set back by decades in comparison what are standard practices in software development. A little bit like the difference between programming in a modern programming language and programming in Excel.
Thus, in some sense I am impressed by (e.g. mechanical) engineers who despite all this actually are capable to accomplish creating a product (and I do believe that if the practices improved, they could do so much more).
It's more fundamental than this, IMO. No matter how much you invest into faster iteration cycles, physical world just takes a long time, and the worst part is, you either have to get some very complicated thing right the first time, or add a sufficient buffer to your plans. Discovered a bug in your chip after initial tapeout? Add months to the schedule. Too much RF crosstalk in the PCB? Add a couple of weeks at least. Take Apple for example. Do you think they didn't invest into faster iterations? I'm sure they did. And each chip still takes 3+ years there, too. Qualcomm? About 3 years. Google? Also about 3 years (I heard of the upcoming 192GB TPU being developed over 2 years ago when I was there; it was announced this week). The "innovations" that they are talking about today were actually decided 3 years ago. 3 years ago was a very different time, of course.
There's also another problem when it comes to chips. On the higher end, you have to design for the technological processes that don't yet exist. E.g. 2nm did not exist 3 years ago, yet the design of the chips that use it was done back then. You're also doing it with bleeding edge tooling.
I can't believe people still buy the Purism scam after all these years...I ordered a Librem 5 and a Pinephone back in the days of the other supply chain story(Covid). The Pinephone flew in from China in less than 2 months; the Librem 5 took more than 4 years to arrive. All Purism offered during that time were "opportunities" to invest and exhausting delay stories about failing supply chains, while keeping their customers completely in the dark about their order state. Instead of preying on the goodwill of FOSS enthousiasts, they now try to tap into a new market (nationalism) to sell the same useless overpriced brick to.
Purism laptops were great when I was a customer. Very sad they couldn't fix the issues you're talking about. I wanted to support the company further, and I think they are doing sincere, good, important work, especially on the software side. But these communication and customer relationship issues didn't get better and I switched away.
Communication and customer relations issues. My experience, and that of many others online, was that Purism was not transparent or apparently honest about things like timelines and delays. People also had problems with getting Purism to honor refunds, warranties (I had this issue), and similar, exacerbated by communication. This continued to happen over a period of years.
I'm not here to relitigate the whole Purism saga. I bought 4 Purism products, was one of the first people in the world to own a Librem 5, I invested (donated?). I love the company mission, I think it's fantastic that you're daily driving a Librem 5. But I'm not ready to engage again myself, and that's too bad, but I think a lot of people ended up feeling the same way.
> Purism was not transparent or apparently honest about things like timelines and delays
Yes, they did have huge refund and shipping time issues and I don't trust their time estimations anymore. They almost went bankrupt and couldn't issue refunds for a long time. However this is irrelevant today, as their devices are finally available to order and AFAIK the refunds were issued. There were never issues with security, backdoors (unlike Lenovo, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superfish#Lenovo_security_inci...), nonfree software or the like.
The issue is pretty obvious to most normal people. My ex bought a Purism phone and laptop, said he would switch to Linux the moment they arrived at his doorstep. He ended up buying a new Macbook and iPhone before any of his Purism hardware started shipping. He might still be using the Apple hardware too.
I love FOSS as much as the next guy but you're being outright facetious if you can't see Purism's problem.
While I'm not going to defend Purism the company, I just wanted to note I listen to MP3s on a daily basis using that useless overpriced brick I acquired used from ebay.
There was an option to pay like $20 for literally nothing just to support the idea of an open source phone. I did so many years ago.
Worst $20 I ever spent. The amount of spam I've gotten as an "investor" is fucking ridiculous. The amount of times I've opened my email to see an "investment opportunity" from Todd Weaver (originating from multiple email addresses, no functional way to unsubscribe) is downright insulting.
From the bottom of my heart: fuck Todd Weaver, whose name is at the bottom of hundreds of spam emails I've received going back years.
I'd be happy to provide dozens of examples in my inbox that prove otherwise, and that's just the ones that have escaped my spam folder over the years.
I can also provide you with examples of other people's less than flattering replies about the exact same issue that have somehow reached my inbox (I'm assuming due to a brief misconfiguration).
> Instead of preying on the goodwill of FOSS enthousiasts, they now try to tap into a new market (nationalism)
Designing and selling the only existing phone made in USA, when everything is produced in China and has a risk of containing backdoors, is as far from nationalism as it gets. (And I'm not an American.) It's true innovation and an offer of a peace of mind for activists and journalists. Even though the USA turns into something bad, the phone runs an FSF-endorsed distro and provides schematics, so you can verify everything yourself (or rely on the community). You comment looks disingenuous to me.
They invented name "Liberty Phone" before Trump made this a thing. Perhaps they should rename it, I don't know. What I know is that this modern device is as free (as in freedom) as it gets today for modern devices.
>We always were sort of maintaining two different bills of materials of Chinese componentry and Western componentry because they're different. Then we produced five different iterations of the Librem 5 phone through Chinese contract manufacturing. And we iterated through those five changes over the course of about 18 months. At that point, we finally had a production ready product. And then we were able to take everything that we did and bring it to US soil.
How many iterations can they get done in US in 18 months? That's what's going to kill Made in USA, if you can't get the design done on time, not a few $100 extra in PRC vs west sourced BOM, but millions more spent on development over longer time frame because lack of talent. Is the short/medium term solution still to send "homework" to Chinese prototype teams? I suppose economics of PRC speed and few prototypes > 100%+ tariffs.
Engineers in the US would be able to get five iterations done using US fabs and assembly too, it’d just cost a ton more to get the same lead times and pay for the NRE.
Last time I worked on something of this complexity in 2019, 1 week turn around prototypes would cost $2-5k for the assembled PCBs from China but $30-50k in the US. It also took a bit more effort and inventory to make sure all the parts were stocked or shipped on time, which is a problem when you can’t visit Shenzhen’s malls if you’re missing a part. Once the first iteration was done, we were averaging between one and two months per revision. It’s very doable but nobody except medical, defense, and aerospace are willing to pay the price.
Kind of a pointless debate point (and economic plan) as it will always come down to humans and market conditions. Where the humans are who specialize and have deep experience in that stuff chose to work. You cant really fake that stuff via subsidization over long periods without also having all the other pieces of the market in place (all the way from low level workers to capital markets to regulatory environments and even attractive living costs)... otherwise Canada and EU would have grown a larger tech industry by now via their gov programs.
There has to be strong organic production and only then can gov help tip the scales upward, instead of generating it from thin air at the top level. If no one is fleeing China to do it in the US the same way people fled American market conditions to build stuff in Asia it won't happen.
Creating a forced siloed market through tariffs is probably the least efficient and most expensive method to achieving it. But it can plausibly if the domestic market gets used to not buying the nice things the rest of the world has for a decade (similar to what western gov is choosing to do with banning Chinese EVs but applied a thousandfold).
More of a tongue in cheek comment. Gone are the days of "designed" in California "assembled" in China. There's a lot of Chinese designing to get the assembling part done now. If the only way you can goto market in reasonable timeframe is to have PRC iterate your design by rapidly leveraging their supply chains and human capita, then it's not really Made in USA Phone.
> ‘Let's take an existing made-in-China product and then just produce the same thing in the US.’
This is what got me. I remember 40-50 years ago everything (or most) "made in the USA". And how "Chinese product" was an insult while "American product" was a badge of honour. Oh how the turnstable..
When I was studying in the UK the _most_ diligent students were the Chinese ones. First to come, last to leave, spent hours and hours on workshops, but they were not interested in staying in the UK to live/work there. As if they were on a mission. Go-Learn-Return-SpreadKnowledge. Many other nationalities were tempted by the mighty-GBP and stayed. But not the Chinese. Vast majority of them learned as much as they could and then went back home. That was mid-90s.
And those 20yo students of the mid-90s are 50yo with great studies and 30 years of experience, and there were thousands of them studying all over the UK, USA, and other countries. So there you have it..
I keep thinking of "Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order by Ray Dalio" [0]. The game is almost over, time for the next cycle..
>We sell a Chinese made Librem 5 phone for $799. We sell the Liberty phone for $2,000. When you're looking at just those numbers alone, that looks like a giant leap in cost. But there's a couple of factors that are not publicly known when you're looking at just those prices. When you're looking at COGS, cost of goods sold, our Librem 5 phone is equivalent in cost to about an iPhone. It's about $500 and some odd dollars, $550. So we can see that the Librem 5 phone doesn't have a very high margin when we sell it. The Liberty phone, same COGS componentry wise, but to produce it on US soil, we're adding not quite a hundred dollars. So it's about $650 to produce that entire phone.
So the phone that costs them $550 is sold for about $800, while the phone that costs them $650 is sold for $2000. I wonder why is such a big difference in the margins.
These are interesting numbers and they're oddly buried towards the bottom of the article. A ~20% mark up for mostly sourcing and manufacturing in the US is less than I'd expected, especially given the 250% price difference. He does say something about why that is:
> It's the fact that it's a secure supply chain, that you know, staff that's completely auditing every component, which means we're selling to a government security market with all those additional layers that we've added on top.
So a mix of marketing and supply chain security. Businesses charge the price people will tolerate paying.
Something that caught my attention is how they started with Chinese design and engineering because that was where the knowledge was. They they learned and appropriated that knowledge to the point where this was not needed anymore.
I love this approach, as it’s not purely commercial, it’s focused on knowledge, and it’s not “stealing” tech, they probably have that on their contracts and the like.
Also, it’s EXACTLY what China set out to do a few decades ago, and foreign industrialists and capitalists were so eager to spend less, they flocked over there, and the Chinese now have the knowledge as well as the labor force do to what they do.
Some people love to cry about how China is “stealing” American tech, when in reality no one ever pointed a gun at a tech CEO’s head and said “you must move manufacturing to China.” They did it because it was profitable, and they knew the terms.
I’m not saying industrial espionage doesn’t happen in China, it does, as it does anywhere else. I just don’t like the rhetoric of saying they’re “bad” for doing a perfectly legal business tactic.
"manufacturing expertise exists primarily in China, Vietnam, Cambodia, and other countries" lol. What's this skill that Cambodians have that Americans can't learn or can't be automated by robots? Can they juggle 4 wrenches in the air simultaneously?
Expertise exists primarily where things primarily happen. If no companies manufacture complicated products in a particular country that doesn't mean the country is too dumb to make it, it means they don't have a large pool of experts in that field.
If you read the article, the founder of purism even says as much.
"After we were successful on the Librem 5 crowdfunding campaign, we took our own electronics engineers (EEs), and then we worked with Chinese design and manufacturing through 2018, 2019, and 2020, because that's where every phone is made."
So the only phone that qualifies for "Made in the USA" tag learned (at least in part) how to make it from Chinese engineer(ing firm)s.
So basically you can find qualified workers everywhere. There's a valid question about the cost. But to say the problem is lacking "skilled workers" is laughable as most of these skills are machine dependent and can only be learned on the job after the factory is built.
American and multi-national companies often build such factories in low-income countries. It's not that no one in the US knows how to build factories. It's purely a cost/regulation question.
It's the same kind of people who would design a city with no toilets or waste water treatment. Everything is easy when you ignore half of the requirements.
I had a Librem 15 and I will never buy another Purism product again.
I wish it was good, but the product broke in less than two years. Worse yet, when it broke Purism couldn't help at all because they stopped making the 15s.
The first issue I had was the battery not being replaceable since they stopped making the 15's battery and couldn't offer any OEM/part info for a replacement.
The second issue was more serious, the motherboard simply died and couldn't boot.
At least I was able to recover the drive/ram which went into my new system76 laptop (that was 2.5 years ago).
Lol, i hadn't even checked the status (or existence, even) of ST's US factories. I've just known the company for a good amount of years having worked with their products for several projects and thus already knew that the biggest portion of their factories and offices is spread across France and Italy (whence their venture originally started from), so to present it as a Swiss company just underlined a very poor knowledge of the topic IMHO
"On those two products we take the printed circuit board, which is just a blank board that has no components"
Don't count on that. On Schneier's blog years ago, we brainstormed attacks on hardware in subversion discussions. One idea was putting a hidden chip in the board itself. Another was modifying the board's material to emanate secrets for RF attacks by a nearby attacker. There's a reason high-security at NSA required TEMPEST shielding. I wonder who prints the circuit boards.
On the chip side, substituting one of them with the same covers would be an easy attack. One team showed a tiny change at analog level could have subversive effects with low odds of being spotted. I wonder how they verify they received the correct chips.
Just from a domestic, manufacturing angle, the story sounds great. I'm grateful the company made sacrifices to make smartphones in America. I hope their example leads to innovation that drives the prices further down.
"we are doing the entire manufacturing process of all of the electronics, meaning resistors, capacitors, integrated circuits"
I disagree with this take unless the integrated circuits are designed and fabbed in America and by Purism. They're critical, high-value parts of the product that used to be piles of individual components before ASIC's. If not made here, I'd say upfront it's manufactured in USA "except for (percentage or function of) integrated circuits in it."
How much would it cost to create the equivalent of a first generation iPhone 8 with more storage space in America?
That phone had everything necessary for communication, navigation, and even some basic photography and entertainment.
Imagine a whole industry of distraction free dumb phones being built, by economic necessity right here in America, that then result in lower rates of addiction and better mental health.
my bank doesn’t support iphone 7 anymore so i guess it’s getting closer to a dumbphone, and not doomscrolling my bank account is definitely a plus for my health
Was just thinking about this the other day. Why were the librem and the pinephone never updated? I'd like to get a new one, but am sure not going to buy something 10+ years old at this point. (Would be happy if a new one was comparable to my old iPhone 6s.)
I know there's not a lot of money in them. But if you want sales at all you better update your hardware more often than never.
Librem 5 is starting to get old, can't argue with that, but it's not quite 10+ years old yet. It's a 2018-2019 design based on a SoC that went into GA in 2018. Even though its ARM cores weren't state-of-the-art at that time already, it has bigger caches, stronger GPU and faster DDR that what you would usually find paired with similar cores earlier, giving it a solid boost when compared to, say, PinePhone, which uses a CPU that seems very similar from a quick glance at specs on paper until you actually try to use it.
I've been using L5 as my daily driver for years now and I don't feel very constrained with its performance just yet. The most painful things are related to lack of features in its SoC rather than its age - such as no hw video encoding or camera ISP, which means that things that other phones do efficiently in hardware have to be done in software. i.MX 8M Quad isn't the best suited SoC for mobile phone use-case, but it was the best that was available back then given other constraints of the project.
Today there's still no abundance of such choices, but there actually are a few more interesting ones on the market. I hope we'll see some projects following through soonish, as I'll eventually need an upgrade path for my Librem 5 indeed.
Maybe not in years, but my iPhone 6s debuted in 2015 and Android of the time was competitive. These phones don't match it. It's not so much bad performance I object to but spending top dollar on something that's already long obsolete. Qualcom is supposed to have competitive CPUs now.
An business should be able to buy cheap Android phones in bulk, install Linux, charge an extra $100/yr for drivers and support, and start a nice little business. Believe Purism already has a subscription where they provide vpn, matrix, and other privacy tools, so they are almost there.
Maybe they need an investor, but honestly the capital outlay should be tiny for the amount of goodwill and eventually business it would bring. With the trillions sloshing around with nowhere to go at the moment, it could change the world for the better.
> An business should be able to buy cheap Android phones in bulk, install Linux
Good luck with that. Unless you settle for Android middleware underneath your OS (like some existing projects do), it's a massive undertaking. You still need to invest a lot into R&D while you lose what's differentiating you in the process (in case of Librem 5, there are things like hardware kill switches, PGP card reader, replaceable M.2 modules etc.) so you can chase SoCs that will already be considered obsolete once you're done with the software anyway. Even Purism with their prices couldn't afford to use an unsupported SoC and relied on NXP's upstreaming efforts.
I suspect that if I was wrong and it was actually a viable path it would already be taken by someone. Maybe we'll see something appearing in coming years, as these days more vendors actually started to care about mainline support, but as it is today the landscape is still not that great, especially when it comes to SoCs that are actually targeting smartphones.
Lots of companies build/buy/sell cheap phones and presumably put some work into getting Android up on the hardware.
I think maybe that's where Purism went wrong. They tried to go pure from the get-go. But think it would be better to get a profitable product out first, and then invest in opening components, one by one.
I don't need a perfect device. Rather hardware getting better every year. Then I could upgrade, and they'd make more money.
Getting Android up on the hardware is easy - you just grab the unmaintainable kernel fork provided by the vendor and you're 90% there.
I'm not interested in Android though, so I just wouldn't buy such phone no matter how cheap would it be. I'm not interested in upgrading every year either. Librem 5 is great, but unfortunately I'll need something to upgrade to in a few years anyway, as the Web has a tendency to only get heavier with time.
And that's what I'd love to see. It's not as easy as you make it appear though. An obvious upgrade path for Librem 5 would be a newer SoC from i.MX line as there have been several released since, but all of them are even less suited for a smartphone than i.MX 8M or come with downgrades in some important areas, such as GPU - so this now calls for a complete redesign around a different vendor. Not impossible, but not cheap either.
Grabbing some cheap Android devices is a path to nowhere. Otherwise we all could be just grabbing them and putting postmarketOS on them ourselves, as there's no shortage of such devices on the market.
A defeatist mindset. The point is to make money, then invest in making more.
For example my new starlite linux tablet is awesome and star is making money hand over fist. Because they finally built a good one and stopped making excuses. They develop firmware with coreboot and upstream patches to Linux.
That’s what a successful business is, you invest then reap the rewards.
Guess I thought of that one as more like a "fix," since the first one was not fit for purpose. Still not good enough, needs spec bump and driver support.
I was looking at potential linux phones the other day, postmarketOS has ports for phones as new as fairphone 4 and OnePlus 6. They don't have any phones with decent camera support though.
$2000 is a punchline to a joke? No?? OK then, we're back at the 1990s cost level, when cell phones were as big as a brick with 50% of it being a battery.
It's more like 2017 era technology done at a very small scale with massive markup (I think they mention it costs them like $650 to produce). They don't have the scale needed to access the latest chips.
It's kind of amazing the markup and also their listed BOM costs when if a no-name Chinese company made a phone with this level of specs and put it on Amazon it would be like $100.
I wonder why won't they do this then. There's still no comparable GNU/Linux phone on the market to this day, so this would be a huge opportunity if true. The only exception may be PinePhone Pro, but it isn't much cheaper than Librem 5 and its software maturity is still lacking.
1. People who are required to use a product with very specific certifications.
2. People who want to use a product with a desirable backstory.
In the first instance the US military requires testing and certifications that are costly to achieve, creating a moat for military suppliers.
In the second instance, some podcast listeners are willing to significantly overpay for generic supplements due to the backstory and their trust in that podcaster.
I am curious what the market breakdown is for this device - how many do they sell for case 1? how many do they sell for case 2?
Also, if they don't sell very many, then their manufacturing capital costs, design and supply chain overheads per phone will be very high.
This is kind of like the PCB pricing story, they could be priced competitively but that's not how the market in the US for domestic PCB manufacturing has been setup. It's been setup to target things that must be made here, where pricing is usually dictated by that demand rather than a competitive market rate.
If china were taken out of the picture (e.g. JLCPCB) ideally a competitor would attempt to take what was that market. Or not? Maybe the margins are low and this is why it hasn't happened here already.
They use i.mx8 by NXP. But that is not a mobile phone SoC. NXP has Fabs in USA where these can be made.
On purism the actual mobile phone part is on a separate modem board. The Modem is Made in China, using Qualcomm chip made in Taiwan. I presume QC could make some of their SOCs in TSMC American plants if someone makes a big enough order.
It took several decades of consistent development. It is not possible to do that, in US with 4 year election cycle. Next gov will just roll back all reforms, and redirects all money...
exactly is not like a president can override congress powers and be able to dismantle agencies or set tariffs for example. everyone will trust the stability of the policies then.
Presidents can work with Congress to pass laws that last more than 4 years. We used to do that kind of thing around here but now that it's all just a big game open only to the outrageously wealthy, tit for tat and I got mine are the norm. There is no path for progress in that system. We must return to the old way of doing things where the executive and the legislature work together on the critical items that cannot be solved for in 4 or 8 years.
You know that time of stability a few decades ago when tens of millions of Chinese were starving to death and being massacred in the Cultural Revolution.
Imagine if Trump pulled young men's name from a lottery and forced them to go shoot people on the other side of the Earth in defense of "capitalism".
That is literally what my father and his friends dealt with as young men after dealing with the Cuban Missile Crisis as children.
I only dealt with this one time in 1st grade. Air raid drill, get under the desk kids and cover your head to practice in the event the Russians drop a megaton h-bomb on the school.
Or the stability of WW1 or WW2?
1990 to 2020 was a wonderful time, I feel so lucky to have lived my life then but that was a completely abnormally calm time in history.
> It took several decades of consistent development.
Well... and massive investments. Where did those come from?
> It is not possible to do that, in US with 4 year election cycle
The great thing about Trump is he has made everyone forget that Congress exists and has these responsibilities.
> Next gov will just roll back all reforms, and redirects all money...
The other great thing is people forget Trump has donors and investors on his side who benefit from all these changes. The next administration will be just as beholden to these interests as this one is. The current US president is just a branded token of the elites. It's meant to keep the population in check not create a policy free for all.
Congress has made everyone forget that Congress exists by delegating enormous amounts of their power to the executive. They could reassert their power over tariffs at any time, but they won't.
Taiwan is a democracy with 4 year elections. When Taiwan operated in one party rule under the Chiang family they did not make significant economic progress.
> When Taiwan operated in one party rule under the Chiang family they did not make significant economic progress
This is objectively wrong.
Taiwan made tremendous economic progress during the period of one-party rule under Chiang Kai-shek and later his son Chiang Ching-kuo. During the KMT's authoritarian rule from the late 1940s through the 1980s, Taiwan experienced the "Taiwan Miracle". Land reforms in the 1950s boosted agricultural productivity and created a rural middle class. In the 1960s Taiwan shifted from an agriculture-based economy to an export-oriented industrial economy, and by the 1980s Taiwan had one of the fastest-growing economies in the world, with GDP growth rates often exceeding 8-10% annually. Chiang pursued an export-led growth model, encouraging foreign investment and industrial development, supporting industries like semiconductors, which is why you have TSMC today.
The KMT government also made major investments in education, particularly in science and engineering, hugely increasing literacy rates. All these strategic initiatives and policies meant that Taiwan became one of the Four Asian Tigers by the 1980s.
On a slightly related note, on Taiwanese social media today it is not uncommon to come across Taiwanese people lamenting that the KMT built the TSMC, and the DPP is selling it out. Whether this is a fair and accurate assessment of the DPP is another discussion, but this seems to be the sentiment among many Taiwanese these days.
Credit where credit is due, you're right. I'll admit, I was very unimpressed with the Chiang family's rule in general and ascribed the success of Taiwan to them not being charge, which was not correct. Quoting from the end of the wikipedia background article on the Taiwan Miracle:
> After retreating to Taiwan, Chiang learned from his mistakes and failures in the mainland and blamed them for failing to pursue Sun Yat-sen's ideals of Tridemism and welfarism. Chiang's land reform more than doubled the land ownership of Taiwanese farmers. It removed the rent burdens on them, with former land owners using the government compensation to become the new capitalist class. He promoted a mixed economy of state and private ownership with economic planning. Chiang also promoted a 9-years compulsory education and the importance of science in Taiwanese education and values. These measures generated great success with consistent and strong growth and the stabilization of inflation.
if you believe that, i have a bridge to sell you. the us government has a very definite consistent policy trajectory. only culture war issues sort of sometimes wobble. usually republicans shake things up and democrats cement in the changes.
People underestimate the importance of individuals sometimes, like Morris Chang, without whom Taiwan would probably be more comparable to SK or Vietnam.
If you're ever in Shenzhen, I recommend going to the Shenzhen Museum. It's pretty amazing to see how quickly it grew (~40 years), and the level of stuff that they were making early on vs now.
Another big take away for me was that they highlighted who had been the chief customs officer over time. Controlling the flow of goods in and out is matter of pride for Shenzhen and China.
I wonder how much it costs to do the following -- let's backtrack.
We already know that US companies can design phones, like Apple.
OK so the next step is to figure out where to source the components -- and under the context of OP's article, that means which components can be sourced directly from the US, or from the EU (i.e. manufactured inside EU, not branded in EU but sourced elsewhere).
Once we can figure out which components are economically feasible to be manufactured in the US and EU with the tariff, we might be able to go from there and slowly expand the operation to the rest of the chain.
Companies will never pay an American worker what an American worker needs to survive or live. This is going nowhere because unlike China where street food is had for pennies, American street food is BK, McD's and Taco Bell for $$$. Cost of living? Americans want homes, they don't want to live with their families, they want cars not bikes. Manufacturing in America will take a century. IMO
There's margin (on BOM cost), and then there's profit margin (above the design cost).
Design costs are probably an order of magnitude higher in USA than in China, and can't be spread over hundreds of thousands of units. I'd bet the profit isn't that great.
My read for that was "a human could, reasonably, count one-by-one the number of engineers if they were all arrayed in front of them", while a human can't reasonable count "one, two, three" and get to a million.
I would say that a number humans can reasonably count to is about ~15,000, maybe 25k, assuming you're limited to about 15 hours of counting. Any number over about 100k is simply a number humans are incapable of counting up to from one.
Maybe they forgot the word "more"? It makes sense to me:
"You could count the number of skilled electronics engineers on US soil, and [whatever that number may be] there's probably a million MORE in Shenzhen alone."
I suspect the quotation was due to that inside their own head — that they were actually going to say "on one hand" but stopped themselves because it wasn't correct.
It may mean that the set of the skilled electronics engineers on US soil is countable, so it is finite or there could be a one to one correspondence with the set of natural numbers.
> A year ago I would've been ready and willing to pay double price for a fully US-made phone.
Why? What justified double the price a year ago? Especially since you sound like you're not an USer...
Ok maybe avoiding China would have been a good idea 1 year ago too. But from that to overpaying for something just because it's made in the most expensive country in the world...
I'm surprised that they admitted that their cost to produce the phone in China is $550 and they sell it for $799, while the cost to produce the phone in the US is $650 and they sell it for $2000. That's a 45% markup on one and 207% markup on the other.
Taking just those figures in mind, they shouldn't be at all worried about tariffs - anything more than an 18% tariff, it's cheaper for them to build in the US than China for US customers. Honestly, that's much lower than I expected, especially considering they're even more restrictive in their component sourcing than most companies would need to be because they're catering to a security-focused group.
I guess the real issue is that they don't have any more production capacity in the US, rather than it just being a cost issue.
Define "produce", I guess? The price differential suggests that it refers to final assembly, which is common when components have different tax codes than the final product.
Creating domestic jobs this way doesn't have a great track record however. They are usually quite expensive. And they don't help the geopolitical uncertainty at all, which is at least hinted at being something of an end goal.
Sure, you can ship parts all over the phone and have assembly in the final country. But what does that solve? What people usually think of when discussing where products are "produced", the components or at least a majority thereof, is the same.
Where do you source OLED screens in necessary quantity to produce a popular mobile phone model in the US, or any other Western country? Or the batteries? It's not a question of cost. It a question of non-existence.
Changing global production is a not a singular problem but something that would require laser focus during several decades and many different areas just to be something that could be taken seriously.
> Creating domestic jobs this way doesn't have a great track record however
Especially when you gut the DoE and make zero effort to invest in either higher education or trades training.
If US wants a manufacturing revolution it needs to start with an education revolution.
I don't see how the US can compete with China on sheer production and access to manufacturers and suppliers of tech, compared to cities like Shanghai, Qingdao and Shenzhen, among others. It's like a candy store for engineers. Building a single plant just isn't economically feasible when you have so much uncertainty from the chaos at the WH. Not to mention, this will take a decade or much, much more.
A better way (IMO) to do it would have been tax incentives to build US plants to move manufacturing back in the US, have research university programs as feeders for tech innovation centers, and funding for technical colleges to expand their programs for skilled labor needed instead of gutting multiple agencies that would have overseen/guided this expansion. And oversight, of course. And attainable goals set in contracts to receive funding, not just, "here's a pile of money we'll forget about in 4 years."
Digikey, McMaster-Carr. Lots of other options. they might not have a store front in your city, but they can get you everything you need for reasonable prices.
Those are distributors and there is only a handful of them.
In China they have the manufacturer down the street from the distributor who is down the street from your factory.
With Digikey we are paying $80 to overnight a $5 part from Minnesota. We need to be able to go send a guy to pick it up in an hour.
No sane company wants to work that way. Just in Time is a great thing, you shouldn't be over nighting anything you should be working so that you know when you need each part months in advance. If you can get a part in China faster it is because someone has expensive inventory and that is a bad sign in general. You do of course need some emergency supply and such, and retail customers don't plan in advance well - but a business shouldn't be buying retail anyway.
It's not JIT, it's that planning works on months advance notice like you mention is in large part because the supply chain is global and shipping takes a lot of time. When digikey has a month lead time because some component is out of stock, it often means "It's going to take a month for this to arrive from the factory".
In China, you can just go down the street to the factory.
As for shipping overnight, it's incredibly common in R&D and repair.
Only if the factory in China will make that thing today. If they are one their New Year holiday (I forget what they call it) you won't get anything. If they are busy making something else you won't get anything - unless by human factors you can convince them to work for you instead of meeting their promises to other customers.
Sure, but you don't have to wait 6 weeks for a cargo ship.
The concept of having centralized full-chain production for enormous productivity boosts is not some wild concept, it's ancient and well known. Industries have clusters because it benefits everyone in the cluster. The US has very few and weak manufacturing clusters.
Your only mistake is thinking those institutions are filled with competent people rather than being a jobs creation program for the inept
This is a chicken-and-egg problem. It's economically irrational for any given individual to pursue vocational training in a field where there isn't a job waiting for them at the end. You can make the training in these fields available, but without the jobs, who will bother using it?
One of the root causes of the situation we find ourselves in is that the federal government has been subsidizing higher education beyond diminishing returns for decades. Simply removing the mechanisms to do that would be a net improvement.
> Define "produce", I guess?
If you're sincerely interested in the answer to that question, I'd highly recommend reading the article, because a good portion is dedicated specifically to answering that.
I read the article - up to a point. The guy goes to such great lengths not to admit that a huge proportion of the physical parts in the phone are from China. E.g, he keeps saying "Western distributor" to avoid saying "China-made." (Think about it: why would any reader care about the distributor's nationality?!) He just rambles on and on, trying to baffle us with bullshit - eventually I stopped reading.
There is zero chance that a smartphone will ever be made out of 100% US-manufactured parts, or even close to it. And the evidence is right in this article, if this is the best effort to manufacture a "US phone."
> Define "produce", I guess?
The article does, in fact. Their US made phone is manufactured, not just assembled, in the United States, and also attempts to source nearly all parts and materials from US suppliers as well.
Yes, and article starts out by definining manufacture as "assembly using more advanced tools than a screwdriver". They solder. Good for them. They keep mentioning that their resistors are made in the US. That's great, but not unique to them.
They don't manufacture their important components. Not even Apple does that. No one does. There is roughly zero chance that any of the non-interchangable bits, the SoC, the battery or the screen, is manufactured in the US.
And there is nothing wrong with that. It's just silly to pretend otherwise.
As I read that, "more than a screwdriver" was to make a point about how hard it is to even fulfill the requirements for "assembled in the USA". "Made in the USA" is even stricter. And they were going beyond that and claiming secure supply chains with western distribution. It did seem a little like a marketing pitch since it focused on what they did versus what the final gap really was, but apparently they sell it to the govt for that big markup. Presumably you don't want to try and sneak things past such a customer.
If you're just thinking of price, the farther down the supply chain you go the less impact of tariffs.
All of their PR says "Made in the USA Electronics," which is oddly specific that it may refer to just parts in the phone and not the actual phone.
I mean, again, you could essentially just post FUD that is directly refuted in the article, or you could... look. They specifically cite their NXP CPU is manufactured in South Korea. But to act like fabricating the mainboard here in the US is not manufacturing is remarkably silly. Your previous post referred to "final assembly", which would suggest just plugging some final components together, which Purism clearly is doing significantly more than.
https://puri.sm/products/liberty-phone/#table-of-origin
and how do you check if electrons in the circuit are US and not Chinese?
Cost is just one part of the equation. What about the ability to quickly switch the supplier of a part, to make a small design change, to ramp up the production of the next model, etc? Lots of articles suggest that you can start manufacturing and adapt much faster in China than in the US.
Also, there is nothing in the article that talks about the quality of the phone. Being manufactured in the US does not automatically make it a high quality product. I'd take an iPhone manufactured anywhere in the world than this Liberty phone.
> the real issue is that they don't have any more production capacity in the US
Economists selling people on free trade like to omit this, but production capacity, efficiency, cost, and technical know-how, aren't static, but improve based on demand.
You do not understand microeconomics. No economist would ever advocate for free trade in an academic environment. Competitive markets are the goal. The older I get the more I think microeconomics should be a basic course for voters. All the things you list “production capacity, efficiency, cost, and technical know-how” are well studied.
And you seem to be omitting that they won’t change given the demand won’t change.
In other words, people won’t just buy multiple iPhones just because it’s made locally.
I omitted it because I thought it was so glaringly obvious that it didn't need explaining: a factory owner doesn't care what the global or local demand for a product is, but at the demand for his factory's output. Which can increase, despite the consumer demand staying the same, if the competitiveness of other factories diminishes, like from tariffs.
It's $650 in a world in which you don't have tariffs with China.
In a world in which you do, you pay more for the machines, the materials, the components you can't make in the US (a phone is thousands of component, phone makers don't make most of them), etc.
It's probably $650 to design it, build half the parts, ordering most other parts and assemble them.
Now what's interesting with the tariffs is that it's not just it will make the parts you can order more expensive, it will make the supply of such parts available to you restricted since you are now competing with buyers that don't have tariffs and can outbid you easily.
Or course, all this include rare earth supply which China already restricted for US export, so even the part you can make are going to be super expensive. The premium is going to be way more than the tariff ones.
Finally, since you are not going to be able to sell to the Chinese market of 1.5M of people, you will sell fewer phones, meaning your volume effect will be lower.
Meanwhile, competitors from Asia and Europe will be able to sell to the rest of the world, unrestricted by such problems, so much more price competitive and with a more robust cash flow. So you will lose markets in other areas too, hitting your volume effect even more, possibly sending you spiraling.
So, it's definitely pop corn time.
Is this the price in just components? I skimmed through the article and that wasn't clear. Because if it doesn't include labor costs, then its reasonable that the US phone sells for a lot more.
Your question prompted me to look up “cost of goods sold”.
From https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/cogs.asp
> Cost of goods sold (COGS) refers to the direct costs of producing the goods sold by a company. This amount includes the cost of the materials and labor directly used to create the good. It excludes indirect expenses, such as distribution costs and sales force costs.
So the $550 or $650 COGS includes the cost of labor for manufacturing, but excludes (say) marketing and auditing costs.
And would exclude all of the R&D, certification and testing, procurement, and in some cases depreciation from factories/equipment
Right, but this is the same company, so the cost of marketing, auditing, R&D, etc. shouldn't be different for these products. That's a fixed cost for the company.
This is a guess, but the argument is probably that it took way more R&D effort for them to figure out how to produce it efficiently in the US, and they've chosen to increase the cost of the US phone variant to offset this particular R&D expenditure that the Chinese variant didn't have.
From the interview:
> So it's about $650 to produce that entire phone. But what we're doing by selling it for greater originally, we're looking at a lot of differentiators for us. It wasn't just made in the USA. It's the fact that it's a secure supply chain, that you know, staff that's completely auditing every component, which means we're selling to a government security market with all those additional layers that we've added on top.
So I guess the answer is that they're selling to the "government security market" so they can charge whatever the hell they want.
It is not just the labor/components, but that it is for a different market with different expectations and requirements. From the article:
> You can look at our concrete numbers. We sell a Chinese made Librem 5 phone for $799. We sell the Liberty phone for $2,000. When you're looking at just those numbers alone, that looks like a giant leap in cost. But there's a couple of factors that are not publicly known when you're looking at just those prices. When you're looking at COGS, cost of goods sold, our Librem 5 phone is equivalent in cost to about an iPhone. It's about $500 and some odd dollars, $550. So we can see that the Librem 5 phone doesn't have a very high margin when we sell it. The Liberty phone, same COGS componentry wise, but to produce it on US soil, we're adding not quite a hundred dollars. So it's about $650 to produce that entire phone. But what we're doing by selling it for greater originally, we're looking at a lot of differentiators for us. It wasn't just made in the USA. It's the fact that it's a secure supply chain, that you know, staff that's completely auditing every component, which means we're selling to a government security market with all those additional layers that we've added on top.
I did find that so surprising that it almost doesn't feel right. Hard to see why they'd bother making two different SKUs in two different places if the cost delta is only $100 they'd surely be better off shifting all the volume to the american phone and working to get it down to down to $550.
How much volume are we talking about. I don't know the important numbers but my guess is the automotion needed to get the in us cost down is more than they sell. That is a million dollar machine that repleces 60 workes is a bad investment when they only have one worker.
*Excluding tariffs.
It's good they are being transparent. This is the future. Does "produce" include staff salaries involved in manufacture? Does it include salaries for staff in R&D?
My understanding of "cost of goods sold", which is quite likely to be wrong, is yes for the first and no for the second. Or at least, it'd include the pro-rated salaries of the staff for the time spent producing the goods.
I think it's essentially if you had all the designs for a product and asked someone else to manufacture it for you, everything they would spend and charge you for producing the product and delivering it to your ship (or whatever), at which point you take over all the rest of the costs including the shipping.
It's cheaper just to buy the hardware from China and install their OS on it. They overcharge for a lot of their products including their mini pc which you can just boy from aliexpress and install coreboot on it for way cheaper, https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/New-Top-mini-pc-i7-10....
Depends on the product. Purism doesn't only sell existing (such as servers) or modified (such as minis) hw designs, but also completely original ones (such as phones).
True, but they're also outdated hardware rise. They also sell a service for "aweSIM" which is suppose to be a privacy sim card, but they literally just sign up for you and then overcharge you. Better to use a MNVO like US Mobile and giving them fake PI.
Selling something with a markup is how business works. It's up to consumer to decide whether the added value is worth the markup. Seems like it's not for you.
As I mentioned elsewhere in this thread already, while the Librem 5 is becoming dated, there's still no upgrade path on the market. You need to switch to a completely different category of devices in order to get something more performant than that. I hope that'll change soon, regardless of whether it will be Purism coming up with L5v2 or someone else with their own thing.
I suspect the margin differential is more demand/volume driven if for example they think ~90% of the volume will be for the cheaper device than there has to be much higher margins on the US phone to cover the associated investment/overhead
Making a $550 phone in china is probably more hand-it-over, while the $650 phone probably has a much higher non-recurring cost for R&D.
And both cases have investment in the OS/schematics which are open.
It's remarkable to me that people don't realize that markets are - by definition and design - a race to the bottom. A single decision maker may hold up efficiency for ideological purity, but, ultimately, an efficient corporation is leaving 5% profits on the table if mfg costs 5% more.
It's fairly obvious that trade barriers are good and necessary for a country, not sure why we've allowed this to go on for so long. It's truly fascinating.
I'm pretty shocked at this price-differential, I guess they are just taking advantage of the lack of competition in the made in USA space.
> I'm pretty shocked at this price-differential, I guess they are just taking advantage of the lack of competition in the made in USA space.
I assume that the answer is much simpler than the "evil capitalist" narrative: the respective company is much smaller, and produces on a much smaller scale.
Thus it is an economic necessity that some part of the money is better used to build up reserves to be able to survive worse times.
Additionally, the smaller scale means that the development costs are a much larger cost proportion than for a company that produces on a huge scale.
I wasn't saying "evil capitalist", just that when the competition is limited you can charge higher prices, this isn't evil unless you have used unethical tactics to enforce some sort of monopoly/oligopoly etc....
The fact that they sell both the made in china model and the USA model shows it is not about building up reserves, as if they wanted to do that they would have higher prices on both models, not selective pricing, thus we are looking for a factor which affects their USA model but not China model.
Development costs are not really a factor here, they specifically say they developed both versions simulatenously, but yes if they didn/t it would be a factor.
They actually back up my first point by giving the reason for the pricing: "It's the fact that it's a secure supply chain, that you know, staff that's completely auditing every component, which means we're selling to a government security market with all those additional layers that we've added on top."
If you distill this down it is saying that basically securing the supply chain costs more, but also that it adds value. The government is willing to pay a whole lot more for the same product for that extra supply chain security even if it doesn't cost that much more for the manufacturer to produce because no one else can offer something like this.
Only 100 more? If theg charged 900 I could see a lot of people buying it. Not happening at 2000
They don’t just arbitrarily set prices… demand comes into it.
Tangentially, I think you'll find a lot of this price inflation happening in the US due to Trump's tarrifs. Even if companies find cheaper places to import, if the customers get used to the higher prices, I find it difficult to imagine they'll drop the cost. Quick to go up, slow to go down.
Only to a certain degree. Wages are probably not going to keep matching price increases. If people have less real disposable income, they aren't going to buy as much.
The important quote: "If the tariff from China is 100%, and you know it is going to be 100 % for the next 10 years, you will make a different business decision than if it is, ‘Might be 100%, not sure what's going to be in three months, what's it going to be in a year from now, and what's it going to be in three years from now.’ That uncertainty does not create stable markets. It does not create very accurate business decisions."
Yeah. If you actually wanted to bring manufacturing back to the US you'd figure out which industries you wanted to develop, probably subsidise them, communicate very clearly what you were going to do and then ratchet up the tariffs on those specific finishes products, whilst being sure to maintain access to raw materials and components you still needed. What you wouldn't do is slap unexpectedly high tariffs on absolutely everything, shout about how you'll do a deal if only they respect you, and then walk them back in as inept and inconsistent a manner as possible. That's what you'd do if you wanted to destroy what's left of your industry. Think there's anyone in the rest of the world relying on US suppliers that hasn't started looking elsewhere? And it might now be cheaper for Americans to import from Japan or South Korea than from US companies dependent on Chinese components in their supply chain...
Subsidizing specific manufacturing and having at least some consistency was a big part of the US strategy until the last few months. Most notably, the US passed huge subsidies for semiconductor manufacturing in 2022.
I don't know how effective that will be but it at least seems more coherent than these goofy tariffs (whatever people think of tariffs overall we absolutely cannot keep shifting them week to week).
> we absolutely cannot keep shifting them week to week
We absolutely cannot create the expectation that we plan to get what we say we want: zero trade deficits.
If we even succeed in making the rest of the world believe we're going to do this it will be catastrophic. So much of the advantages the US enjoys rides on trust and goodwill, and zeroing trade deficits would wreck the world economy and destroy trust in the US dollar as a safe haven. Just like paying down the national debt would.
Zeroing trade deficits means by definition that the rest of the world won't have (many) US dollars.
(Pedantically: it means the rest of the world has exactly as much US currency as the US has the rest of the world's currency)
The trade deficit is a measure of the flow of currency, not the stores.
No, it could also mean that US have many foreign currencies stockpiled.
It was insanely effective: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PRMFGCON. Notice the sharp dip at the end there.
(Software dev working for a European manufacturer of industrial automation equipment)
We just hit pause on a major product development effort in order to go back and re-evaluate some of our vendor choices. Specifically to see how we can eliminate as many dependencies on US companies as possible. Fortunately we were relatively early in a 18-24 month development cycle for a somewhat complex hardware device.
The company already started a project two months ago to look at how we can migrate off AWS and Azure and instead use domestic alternatives for our online systems.
For the hardware components this is a bit more work, but it looks like we can find replacements for most of the key items. Though there are a few components where we would have to rearchitect some of the systems to eliminate US components.
For us it is simple: we need stability and predictability. We have long development cycles and long lifecycles for the things we make. Stopping development and trying to eliminate things that depend on the US is a bit unreal and shocking, but management have to deal with the world as it is.
I know some of my colleagues at other companies in the sector are going through similar exercises.
Right now changes are taking place that will not be visible for years, but that will stick around for decades. The current administration in the US is doing real, long term damage to the US.
It is really weird for us (Europeans) to read hacker news and it see mostly indifference to what is happening in your country. You probably should worry a bit more about this than you do.
You also wouldn't go out of your way to piss off America's two biggest export markets: Canada and Mexico. As it stands, not only are there significant counter-tariffs that would make U.S. manufacturers even less competitive in Canada[1], there is significant consumer backlash to anything American-made where, just a couple months ago, products "Made in the U.S.A." would have been viewed favourably[2].
The way Trump has done things, any company that manufactures in the U.S. had better be able to get by with just the domestic U.S. market, because exports to Canada and Mexico aren't likely to be significant for quite some time, even if Trump backs off quickly. Lasting damage has already been done.
________________________
[1]It remains to be seen if Mexico will eventually retaliate.
[2]Perhaps not favourably in terms of price/quality competitiveness, but certainly in a geopolitical "support your neighbour instead of China" sense.
It also breaks a lot of the way businesses make and sell stuff today.
For example, several car makers makes cars in Canada, Mexico and the US but sells them across the borders (and globally). Honda makes Civics and CRVs in Canada but sells them in the US, but the Accord is made in the US and sold in Canada. So now if there are tariffs on car imports and especially if there is also a reciprocal tariff, Honda gets hit both ways. What would they do? Make some civics in the US and some in Canada? Seems very inefficient.
Factually despite all the noise there are no significant tariffs in either direction at this point in time, 98% of trade is tariff free under the free trade agreement. Mexico and to a lesser degree Canada are in a more favorable position than they were before the tariffs as they are the only countries in this position [1]
[1] https://semianalysis.com/2025/04/10/tariff-armageddon-gpu-lo...
My experience is this: The majority of Americans have a hard time believing we (Canada) are their biggest export market and trading partner generally. Because they barely think about Canada, and when they do it's as a quaint and cold place of no real importance to them.
And this perception has worked in Trump's favour. "Those weak irrelevant people up there are taking advantage of us, time to teach them a lesson" works well when the people you're telling it to don't realize "those people" are their single biggest customer and a source of wealth for them.
American business people aren't generally accustomed to treating their customers this way. I hope they come to their senses.
I'm guessing a few weeks of higher prices will change consumers' minds.
Will that even matter though?
There's a while before another election and longer while before the person imposing tariffs would expectedly leave.
There is a non-zero chance he have at least one more term.
Non-zero in the sense that there is a non-zero chance of an outright coup.
There is absolutely, unambiguously no Constitutional method by which this will ever be true.
It is unfortunately not as unambiguous as one may like:
https://www.npr.org/2025/03/31/nx-s1-5191889/is-trump-runnin...
No, it really is.
22nd Amendment:
> No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once.
12th Amendment:
> no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President of the United States.
You can produce the same bullshit arguments for literally any law in existence because language is inherently ambiguous. If someone starts wiggling into, "well technically it's a bit ambiguous whether we're allowed to mow down peaceful protestors with machine guns," it is incumbent upon all of us to say "no, actually that's not ambiguous."
Courts will look to the public attitude to assess these arguments, and the public attitude should be that blatant accounting tricks like the VP switcheroo are incompatible with both the language and intent of the law.
Or you could try and read the link I provided:
> But winning an election is not the only way a person can become president. And there are hypothetical situations involving presidential succession, Baude adds, that are "not addressed as fully" by the Constitution's text. They reveal ways in which the common understanding of the 22nd Amendment's presidential term limits could be challenged in court. One theory: Trump could become vice president and then president in 2029
> Still, in court, a lawyer could try to argue that being a "natural born" citizen, at least 35 years old and a resident within the U.S. for at least 14 years are the only presidential eligibility requirements specified in the Constitution, says Stephen Gillers, a professor emeritus at New York University School of Law, who proposed in 2004 that Clinton run for vice president.
I'm unconvinced that the Supreme Court will look towards public sentiment.
I did read it, and that argument is bullshit, just like a hypothetical argument that e.g. the government can mow down protestors because they held a mass trial declaring ("satisfied due process") that all people in the street are guilty of a crime and subject to the death penalty. Nothing in the Constitution precludes such an interpretation.
There is no way to write words that preclude all such interpretations, that does not make all possible interpretations valid or reasonable.
> I'm unconvinced that the Supreme Court will look towards public sentiment.
Yet stunningly, SCOTUS decisions overwhelmingly align with cultural attitudes of their time because that is in fact the role of SCOTUS — to adapt interpretations of text to the current cultural moment. That's why it's notable in the few occasions where they conflict.
I know originalists and textualists like to act otherwise, but they're liars, and you know this because they do in fact rule against the text of law when the text conflicts with their cultural imperatives.
Your first argument is hyperbolic.
Secondly you may wish to argue the Supreme Court has acted in such a way historically but recent history clearly demonstrates otherwise:
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2022/07/06/majority-of-...
The more hyperbolic the example, the easier it should be to demonstrate why the language of the Constitution precludes it. Yet you cannot, because that's not how language works, per my point. If I start pushing for this interpretation of the Constitution, the civic, intellectual, and honest reaction is not to say, "hmm, actually it is pretty ambiguous!" It's to say: "that obviously is not allowed and would be tantamount to a coup."
Everyone knows Presidential terms are meant to be limited to two. Everyone knows going for a third term would be an accounting trick. They know it, you know it, I know it.
Your selection of one example out of the 47 cases SCOTUS decided that year (+ countless cases they didn't grant cert to) is evidence of my point, not yours. How many of the other 46 cases can you name? How many of the other 81 cases between then and now?
I'll guess you could name fewer than 4 of them, ergo, as I said: "That's why it's notable in the few occasions where they conflict."
I take it then the courts finding on presidential immunity also supports your view of unambiguous interpretations and the court following public opinion?
I said neither that there are unambiguous interpretations (in fact I said the opposite, that all texts are intrinsically ambiguous but that does not make all interpretations equally sound)
Nor did I say "the court follows public opinion."
I said "courts will look to the public attitude to assess these arguments", which is true, and "SCOTUS decisions overwhelmingly align with cultural attitudes of their time" which is also true.
And yes, the Presidential immunity argument is exactly one such argument: the pro-dictator cultural movement in the US is significant and vocal, while the anti-dictator movement is full of equivocators like yourself who say, "well you know, the Constitution is a bit ambiguous on this point..."
So yes, actually, that decision is an excellent case in point, and a clear reason that SCOTUS should know the American public has no pseudo-intellectualized appetite for a third term.
> in fact I said the opposite, that all texts are intrinsically ambiguous but that does not make all interpretations equally sound
Your original comment was this:
> There is absolutely, unambiguously no Constitutional method by which this will ever be true.
So which is it, there's absolutely no ambiguity or there is some?
> And yes, the Presidential immunity argument is exactly one such argument: the pro-dictator cultural movement in the US is significant and vocal, while the anti-dictator movement is full of equivocators like yourself who say, "well you know, the Constitution is a bit ambiguous on this point..."
So you're saying that the Supreme Court ruled Presidential immunity because of vocal public opinion for dictatorship but suddenly the same court won't rule in favor of interpreting the law to support a third term?
Seems contradictory chief. Regardless I personally hope it doesn't come to a court decision but we'll see in 4 years.
I didn't say that SCOTUS won't rule in this direction. In fact, again, my caution indicates I believe the exact opposite: it is very possible they will, which is why we should cede no ground on the "it's ambiguous" argument. It truly is not ambiguous. It is not even ambiguous to the people who are pushing it. Again: everyone knows it's an accounting trick.
I mean the constitution was effectively ruled to be unconstitutional with the presidential immunity case, so what does anything even matter anymore?
All the more reason to aggressively nip this in the bud so we can get to work repairing the horrible damage they've done to our country.
Yes, republicans in congress can stop this at anytime, and once people tangibly feel prices increase congressional leaders will get scared.
If congress turns heavy blue in 2026, they can rain hell on the mild conservative goals that Trump seems to have taken a nuclear approach to. Congressman do care about their seat, and they do get scared of losing power. Right now Americans are particularly sensitive to price increases as well, with the pandemic inflation still fresh on everyone's mind.
What is the margin for 2026 changing the Senate majority significantly?
I personally am not seeing what influence Congress could push that will hinder the current executive branch even if it wished to.
Personally disappointed to see opposition US liberals in the US still fantasizing that the problem of Trump is going to be solved "eventually" in 2026 or in the courts.
More protests needed. This is tyranny-lite in action, huge overreach by the executive that I'm pretty sure the hallowed founders -- that people always talk about with reverance down there -- would be horrified by. 18th century revolutionaries would be disappointed to see the way people are rolling over.
> which industries you wanted to develop
yup
> probably subsidise them
yup
> communicate very clearly what you were going to do
Probably not. At least, not until right before the ratchet up. You'd want to first subsidize then once industries are starting to build up, you'd want to start the ratchet up. You probably also wouldn't want to say "We are doing this because we want to be better competitors" or whatever. It'd be better if you said something like "We believe country x is doing terrible thing y and for the safety of our country and others we are going to apply a tariff on good z until x stops doing y".
But yeah, universal tariffs are the dumbest idea in the world. We've essentially sanctioned every single nation which is going to massively damage us and manufacturing. Going to be real hard to unwind this.
You might add a bit of "Country X" is bad spin in there as political justification for what you're doing, agreed.
But you would make damn sure you communicated when the tariffs would hit punitive levels so the rest of the value chain knew and had already had chances to find themselves domestic suppliers
Gotta be REAL careful about how you signal things if your intent is ultimately to take over a market. Telling manufacturers you intend to isolate could leak out and ultimately trigger pre-emptive tariffs.
Honestly, just subsidizing is a lot simpler to do and it doesn't run the risk of making the world mad at you or triggering retaliatory tariffs.
You're a lot less likely to get retaliatory tariffs when you're communicating to manufacturers that you intend to raise your $nicheproductclasses tariffs to support domestic manufacturing under industrial strategy and national security policy than when you announce blanket tariffs with threats. The US imposed 100% tariffs on EVs last year for example[1], which wasn't exactly a universally popular move but wasn't likely to provoke a trade war. Much easier to accept losing share of a market than every market, plus also less likely to accidentally punish the manufacturing industries you're trying to support.
[1]there's a certain irony in one of Biden's last actions being to impose tariffs in a way which massively helped Tesla, and one of Trump's first being to propose tariffs that could seriously hurt its supply chain if they don't get exemptions...
Wouldn't you prioritize subsidizing local production over taxing foreign production? It just seems like a much cleaner and more straightforward way to increase local production. It seems like this has been at least somewhat effective with semiconductors over the past ten years. And then you don't have the risk of harming consumers. Everybody wins!
Its why China is technologically eating everyone else's lunch when it comes to renewables and battery tech. Their government dumped massive amounts of money into R&D and building out manufacturing and mining infrastructure.
Heck, it's why the US has been (not for long) a leader in medicine. We've historically dumped huge amounts of money into medical research through the NIH.
Biomedical companies don't like research, they like making money. Research is expensive and by its nature filled with deadends. A biomedical companies would much rather take and run with cheap (to them) NIH research.
China is also clear on the timetable they will turn off the subsidies in order to consolidate the market into the strongest survivors.
Businesses like clear timetables which is the opposite of what Trump is doing right now. So no matter your theories about tariffs what he is doing cannot be good for business.
this narrative doesn't sound right. There isn't very much preventing anyone in any given other country from using NIH research. Moreover a substantial amount of NIH research grants goes to PIs or postdocs or grad-students who are Chinese nationals who then advance their careers back to their home country.
Universities concentrate experts, and that leads to local economies. That's why SF is right outside of Stanford. Google wouldn't be there if that wasn't where Stanford grads lived. The stories about the Chinese government's tremendous efforts to repatriate skilled professionals (like giving them entire factories to run) come about as a result of the fact that they're working against a strong default of staying in the same place.
Because when you subsidize, the taxpayer is paying for it. You are socializing the costs and privatizing the profits.
Whereas in a tariff situation, you are penalizing the consumer for creating an externality (foreign dependence).
The customer and taxpayers are generally the same people here.
So, knock on effects can dwarf direct effects. Tax foreign computer components at some insane rate and perhaps you get a domestic market but you could also see companies start moving their US data centers to Canada and Mexico. Which then has it’s own economic disadvantages.
But not exactly the same people which is the point of motivating behavior. There is at least some degree of flexibility in what you can buy.
Insane rates will of course have insane effects. Which is a separate issue.
> Because when you subsidize, the taxpayer is paying for it. You are socializing the costs and privatizing the profits.
I think that's a really good point. It's extracting money from consumers through taxes and handing them to industry in the hopes they innovate.
Tariffs though. In that case you're extracting the money from the consumer (through the international organizations being taxed) and giving the profits to the government. What are they going to do with it?
Who pays for the tariffs if not the taxpayer?
The US got dominance over the entire world's economy, an unprecedented amount of weal, and almost complete technological dominance with high taxation and direct intervention on the market. And even more, they then taught it to Japan who came and repeated basically the exact same actions with basically the exact same result. Oh, yeah, and then China did it...
Then they organized a bunch of morons to create an school teaching not to do that, celebrated them so they would teach every foreign school, and managed to stop most of the world from competing with them. But a couple of decades later everybody in a position of power there was a moron from that school.
The resources for subsidies come from the taxpayer. Plus how you and who you subsidize becomes political. Lots of complications.
The resources for subsidies come from printing new money (which is possible by having the world reserve currency), and then spending that new money for deliberate purposes instead of just giving it to the banksters to bid up the asset bubbles. In an imaginary world where we had a Congress that served the People and a mentally competent President, of course.
Who gets subsidized is indeed political, but I don't see a way to sidestep that since there's centralization as soon as you take action to prevent the currency from deflating.
To be clear, the US is not unique in its ability to do this. Many other countries would benefit from understanding it! In the UK we have a government wanting to build a growth strategy around finance. It's like a parody that nobody gets (yet).
But Congress doesn't actually decide to print new money? When they decide to spend they have to raise taxes or issue debt (treasuries).
The federal reserve, on the other hand, controls interest rates and other mechanisms which actually result in money "bring created" for practical purposes.
Yes, that is one of the mechanisms that has hamstrung us from being able to appropriately respond to the economic effects of offshoring. It can obviously be changed.
Or the mechanisms themselves might not actually have to be changed if we could cast off this myopic political red herring about "the deficit". What we perceive as the balance sheet of "the government" needs to include The Fed, Fannie/Freddie, etc. Treasuries owned by other countries are the equivalent of a big savings account. Treasuries owned by the Fed are the same as all the other other debt owned by the Fed - monetary creation / monetary inflation.
Political patronage and cruelty is the point.
Nobody says it is effective, only that it is possible.
One way could be to send the message to the market that a certain area is strategically important and any startups will have access to extremely cheap loans and not have to worry about natural resources or personel.
Then follow up on those promises, take a step back, watch the Cambrian explosion that follows and when the businesses seems to have grown legs simply scale back funding and watch them fight it out. One could even say that is exactly what has happened in the world several times over. It is not unique to China.
Subsidization also makes products viable outside of the tariff bubble where tariffs can only really make it viable to places with the same tariffs against the same source(s).
If you really wanted to fix the US economy you'd uncouple the $ from the oil markets and let it float downward - the cost of imports would go up and exporters would earn more (and be more competitive in their domestic markets). The BTW is why China is pushing the yuan down now, because unlike Trump, they understand how this stuff works.
Trade imbalances are simply currency imbalances that haven't been allowed to find their own levels - what you can't do is have an artificially high currency (by requiring all global oil sales be made in it, creating an artificial scarcity) and not have a trade deficit - you can't have your cake and eat it too
The dollar is kept artificially strong through oil, so america can maintain an effectively infinite debt and an arbitrarily large deficit without the dollar ever weakening despite how much is printed…
I’m sure this sounds bad to someone, but if I was America, I wouldn’t try to put the gift horse into the wood chipper.
Oil supported by the world's biggest military and huge subsidies.
It's why moving to renewables would be catastrophic for the US. And for all of the big Fossils, including Russia and the Saudis. And the smaller second-order beneficiaries like the UK who make money from "services" - moving the big money around and avoiding taxes on it.
We're in a messy transition to a post-fossil global economy. It's going to take decades, and it's not obvious how much will be left standing when it's over.
But one way or another, it's locked in and unavoidable.
> uncouple the $ from the oil markets and let it float downward - the cost of imports would go up and exporters would earn more
can you explain it with more details?
If your currency is high value (which USD is due to demand in part due to oil and part due to others having reserves of it), foreign goods are cheap to you. This makes importing attractive, but it makes it very expensive for other countries to buy your exports.
If your currency has a lower value, it’s cheap for others to buy your exports, but expensive for you to import goods.
I don't know if that's true, but it sure is more well thought out than what the US is currently doing. You have my vote.
> If you actually wanted to bring manufacturing back to the US you'd figure out which industries you wanted to develop, probably subsidise them, communicate very clearly what you were going to do and then ratchet up the tariffs on those specific finishes products, whilst being sure to maintain access to raw materials and components you still needed.
I'm not here to defend the current approach, but what you're describing sounds like a centrally planned communist / state-directed economy or something. Is that really the way forward?
The whole idea of the government bringing manufacturing back to the US is central planning. The free market approach is to remove barriers to trade and let things develop as they may.
> The free market approach is to remove barriers to trade and let things develop as they may.
And the events of the last 30-40 years have shown why this is a beyond foolish approach. The 47th and MAGA didn't rise out of nothing, they rose out of the economic devastation brought upon by completely unchecked turbo-capitalism.
Conversely the Chinese government has split their economy into 50% privately owned and 50% state owned, which has fueled decades of rapid and consistent economic growth, so much so that the current administration now views China as our primary strategic and economic rival.
> And the events of the last 30-40 years have shown why this is a beyond foolish approach.
No. The events of the last 30-40 years have shown that extremism is beyond foolish.
Extremism on the other direction got much quicker and way more destructive results.
> what you're describing sounds like a centrally planned communist / state-directed economy or something. Is that really the way forward?
What they are describing is basically what every sane government does, and what the US used to do until, er, a few months ago.
If you consider most western countries to be centrally planned communist states (including the US up until very recently), then I don't have anything else to argue.
It's not quite as bad as central planning, but it's definitely a big dollop of state aid (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_aid), distorting competition.
You may think this is fair, while others disagree. As there's no "world government" arbiter for these kinds of actions, there are only the actions your country takes, and the actions other sovereign countries take in response - for example, all countries in the world could ban import of anything produced by your burgeoning state-aid factories, leaving you with only a domestic market to sell to; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy)#Anti-...
Fun part is, the USA and some other nations of 1947 realized that free markets needed some kind of "universal arbiter" to curb such shenanigans and brought the World Trade Organization (originally GATT, WTO since 1995, not affiliated with the UN) on the way. Most of you probably heard of it.
Virtually all the world's nations are voluntary members. Sure, many criticize it for being a tool of the USA and other western nations to browbeat other nations into shape (e.g. China). There is merit to this claim, but obviously it is not so clear-cut. However, it can't be denied that the WTO has been a tremendously useful tool for the USA and its allies to shape world trade. Somehow the 45th president of the USA thought the USA would get the short end of the stick here and started to obstruct WTO proceedings in 2018. The WTO has lost a lot of its influence since then, removing a powerful tool from the USA's arsenal.
Make of it what you want.
A lot of Americans thought the WTO was a disaster for America. There were violent protests over it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_Seattle_WTO_protests
I think this is the root of the disconnect. A lot of people say "wait, Americans wanted X because it's a useful tool for projecting American power" - whether X is the petrodollar, the WTO, free trade, whatever. But largely it was one segment of Americans that wanted and benefited from it.
As a comparison, Maggie Thatcher imported communist Polish coal in the 1980s and just stopped paying British miners. It saved the country a fortune - it got the same quality and amount of coal for far less money - and sent entire segments of the country into a death spiral from which they'd never recover.
Similarly, the windfall of finding oil off the coast of Scotland in the 1970s made fat stacks of cash for Britain. Maggie Thatcher did not spend that on deindustrialising Scotland. She did not spend it, like the Norwegians, on a sovereign wealth fund that would benefit everyone in the country. Instead, she spent it on revitalising the old docklands of London, and now they're the epicentre of high finance, where the UK makes most of its money in financial services -- mainly for the people who work in that industry, and the South East of England where they live.
These choices ruined the lives of large swathes of the country. But they hugely benefitted the country overall. Were they good choices or not?
Please, give me some credit. Who assumes that any nation's population, or any sufficiently large group of people, really, is a homogeneous, uniform, or monolithic in their opinions? I certainly don't.
Sure, but the point is that a wide spectrum of people, particularly on the left, believed so strongly that WTO was such a net negative for the average American they were willing to violently riot over it.
So when we talk about “a useful tool” in the American toolbox, we should keep in mind that tool mostly, or at least has the perception, of benefiting only the rich.
> You may think this is fair, while others disagree.
I said nothing about fairness. What I said is that every government and some point or another makes use of protectionist economic measures.
> for example, all countries in the world could ban import of anything produced by your burgeoning state-aid factories
This just doesn't happen, at least not for the reasons you mentioned.
China is a good example, as it gives many forms of subsidies to its industries. Other countries respond with a mix of measures to protect the industries they care about.
When I hear about the concept of central planning, it tends to remind me of a mathematician named Leonid Kantorovich I had read about in a textbook. I am not too familiar with the economics concepts that he might have run into, but this article [1] is pretty interesting in regards to how centrally planned socialist economies also need to use the idea of interest rates and prices like capitalist ones.
[1]: https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/bios/Kantorovich.html
Kind of line railroads, or ship building, or the spice trade, or automotive manufacturing, or agriculture in general.
Nuclear power. Solar panels. CPU manufacturing. Weapons manufacturing. Biomed research.
Capitol intensive projects require coordination. Especially projects that can take decades before they pay off.
If you do this to the entire economy, yes sure, fair. If you decide that you want Americans to eat American garlic and you give garlic farmers a tax break or grants to buy seed and fertilizer I wouldn't call that central planning. More "strategic investment".
Replace garlic with whatever industry it is that the gov wants to strategically invest in: semiconductors, automobiles, aerospace, weapons, renewable energy.
I dislike this sort of binary thinking. It's why we are having the problems we have.
Just because some industry gets subsidized and/or ran by the government, doesn't mean we are now all communists. Every government has SOME industry that is ultimately state ran. Fire departments, police, and education are prime examples of nearly universally state ran systems.
There are some industries that just, frankly, work better when state directed, not all of them, but a few. Private fire departments don't work, neither do private police departments.
This is not nor has it ever been an all or nothing thing.
yeah i was thinking subsidizing is exactly what the European Union does, which as everyone knows is very much a radical left soviet like institution
>If you actually wanted to bring manufacturing back to the US you'd...
Sure this seems like a great way for if you can sustain a multi-decade effort
If you have 3.5 years to re-negotiate a deal, maybe you need to move faster.
If you're spending 3.5 years trying to "renegotiate a deal", you don't have a strategy to bring manufacturing back. If you change your policy multiple times in a week you don't even have a strategy.
Easier to onshore manufacturing with multi-year timelines, but you don't need multi-year timelines to impose tariffs on carefully selected industries, not penguins and your existing industries' key suppliers.
Well, if your goal is to pump and dump the stock markets, this is a strategy and it is working.
I don't think that the current administration has enough foresight to actually plan for such a scheme but I think they are smart enough to see an opportunity, to wit the posts on social media shortly before withdrawing some tariffs.
This ignores the reality of power in the US. Presidents can't implement multi-decade initiatives.
>If you change your policy multiple times
you're missing the forest for the trees. the policy has not changed: bring manufacturing back to the US.
> This ignores the reality of power in the US. Presidents can't implement multi-decade initiatives.
Which is why if anyone wanted to actually bring manufacturing "back" to the US they would work with congress and pass laws that curtailed the tariff powers in a way that ensured that in the areas where you wanted long term investment the president would not have the power to change policy unilaterally. At which point the typical congressional gridlock would serve to ensure stability going forward and allow businesses to invest.
That's not a policy, that's a goal.
Presidents don't need multi-decade initiatives to be not so hopelessly inept at trade policy they end up hurting manufacturing rather than bringing it back.
Trump shouting about how his amazing tariffs are going to bring manufacturing back and then promptly cancelling most of them and bragging about how everyone wants to do deals with him and he's going to do beautiful deals isn't any kind of strategy for bringing manufacturing back, and frankly the fact that so many Americans are dumb or partisan enough to insist it is represents a bigger problem for US industrial policy than term limits
Meanwhile, every other country is also negotiating amongst themselves to remove any dependence on the US. Dealing with the US is only to soften the blow and buy time.
>so many Americans are dumb or partisan
This is what it boils down to for you. Other people have a different opinion than you so they're dumb or partisan
Nope, only the people defending the dumbest and most pointless act of economic vandalism in history.
In fact the only argument I can think of in favour of setting tariffs for the Heard and McDonald islands is that the average American that thinks that this level of attention to detail helps US manufacturing probably is less intelligent and capable than the penguins that live there....
Trump-Biden-Trump are 12 years of protectionists being president, if DJT wasn't DJT he could've utilized this to advance his agenda.
Biden was a protectionist?
Biden's Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) was definitely viewed as protectionist. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation_Reduction_Act#Relati...:
> ... some were concerned about the law's provisions favoring American industry. ... the chairman of the 2023 G20 meeting in India, called it "the most protectionist act ever drafted in the world", asking American officials, "You believed in market forces and now you do this?" Other countries have begun to create their own similar laws. China requested WTO dispute consultations with the United States.
> 27 European Union finance ministers have expressed "serious concerns" about the financial incentives of the Inflation Reduction Act, and are considering challenging it. They have listed at least nine points in the legislation, which they say could be in breach of World Trade Organization rules. They were opposed to the subsidies for consumers to buy North American-assembled electric cars, as EU officials believe the subsidies discriminate against European carmakers. One EU official told CNBC that, "there is a political consensus (among the 27 ministers) that this plan threatens the European industry" and its supply of raw materials. In February 2023, the European Commission announced it would propose the "Net Zero Industrial Act", similar to the IRA, in turn putting pressure on the United Kingdom and South Korea.
In the mild sort of way. Mostly Biden didn’t change much and kept things stable (the way businesses like it), but there was definitely room in that for the CHIPs act, which is a double edged sword (by pushing China to invest more in its local chip production). He didn’t bother getting rid of the DJT tariffs that survived after COVID hit either.
This was the entire purpose of the CHIPS act. Biden just took some of the protectionist policies Trump started in his first term and did gave them an actual objective.
Bringing back such industry would take a multi decade effort, in the best scenario (which the US clearly isn't now)
I don't think it's physically possible to move much manufacturing in that time. If you think it is, please give estimates in dollar values, number of jobs, and square footage of factory construction expected.
What is your takeaway? That no effort should be made?
Do it the right way through Congress.
Are the commenters defending the chaos serious or just trolls?
Previous government efforts do not need to be sabotaged every time there's an election. For example, when Biden came in he didn't immediately unwind all of Trump's industrial efforts. He kept the China tariffs, and built on top of them with the CHIPS act to add the "carrot" part of "carrot and stick".
The business decision of these tariffs very well be to just offshore American operations altogether. Better to keep most the world market and lose America. It's not a given businesses will choose to invest in an isolationist country even if they are from there if protectionist policies they may benefit from narrow their horizons.
Most of the demand (in terms of dollars/euros) is confined to the developed world. What happens when both US and EU want to bring back operations back to the home countries? Then these companies are left with serving less of the global demand.
If the tarrifs stay high, then US consumption will plummet since all goods will now be that much more expensive and people won't be able to afford as much.
If tariffs go down then moving manufacturing to the US was the losing choice for any company that chooses to do so.
Either way betting on current US consumption levels with US manufactured goods is a losing bet.
The backdoor is bringing heavily automated factories to the US. The viability of this might still be mixed right now, but at least in the future, even without tariffs, the golden goose of manufacturing is still "locally made by robots."
They invest in Africa and Southeast Asia, and everywhere else that isn’t American/Western Europe, and create demand that way. What do you Xi has been doing for the last 10+ years with Silk Road? China already had a plan for this trade war.
they are building an empire of dust
China is essentially acting like a VC fund. They spread money around everywhere... and get a ton of benefits in return. Local autocrats just love China because their money doesn't come with strings attached (such as IWF or EU/US aid), they get to spend down a chunk of their massive dollar forex reserves, provide a ton of people from their poor provinces with work (Chinese foreign construction projects usually don't hire local labor!), and build up soft power in the population of the countries where they invest.
I'm hoping that wasn't a racist comment (that those other countries aren't worth it for some reason), I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. There is a lot of potential in emerging markets, potential that the Americans have ignored to their detriment (as we are experiencing now, we basically have no leverage over China because they expanded their markets enough over the course of a decade).
It's a reference to a movie called "Empire of Dust" where a chinese-led team has a hard time building infrastructure in Africa.
Whether or not some third world country is worth developing is an economic question, not a moral one. And even if it is, the question of whether or not you will be able to monetize that relationship by the end of it is another one. What the chinse are doing now is basically IMF-style debt trapping of other nations, which doesn't seem like a successful strategy historically.
The bottom line is that if the natives don't want to cooperate with whatever civilization you're building, it's not going to work out. Look at what happened to the USA in afganistan (and pretty much every empire that stepped foot in there). I don't think that's racist, I think it is pretty optimistic outlook towards the sovereignty of nations.
There is a really great movie called Bitter Lake about this, by Adam Curtis.
The Europeans seem to have become more free trade curious after recent events so this doesn't seem like it will hold up as a "what if". And I expect that the coming months of US-only inflation are just going to confirm that position for them even i they face a mild recession due to US market access/demand collapse issues.
The EU has always been on the side of free trade (agreements with Turkiye, Canada, Japan, Mercosur, the failed TTIP etc have been worked on for many years).
But it's also always been protective of the internal market and e.g. added tariffs on Chinese steel recently.
The EU has always been export driven.
Only about 1B people in EU+US. Majority of people only need one phone. If I were a cell manufacturer, I'd drive down costs to service the other 7B people.
Of course, you won't make the same margins as EU+US business. Not sure if that is enough incentive to onshore consumer manufacturing.
The margins get really thin after the first 2 billion or so. Middle income globally is ~10-20 PPP dollars a day and that's only ~17% of the world's population. They're generally radically different phones between markets too no one's really dominating the cheap phone market.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/07/21/are-you-i...
The margins are only thin if you're used to 40% as Apple has been. They're not at all so thin that the rest of the pack aren't making actual profit filling the gap for the other 7B people who aren't well off westerners.
Sure, but say it is: you assume a long-term trade barrier with China, invest in US factories and employee training, bring folks in from outside, start your production, get some competitive wins in the domestic (but obviously not international!) electronics market...
Then some future administration decides on detent and signs a free trade agreement to open markets or whatnot, yada yada. China marches right in and eats your lunch. Again.
Trade barriers do not do anything to address fundamental inequities in production efficiency. To be blunt: China is great at making electronics not because they have all the talent. They have all the talent because China is poor, still. The US is not (though it looks like we're aiming that way). Ergo Chinese production efficiency will be higher.
What trade barriers with China actually do isn't to bring manufacturing back to the US, of course. It's to move production from China to Vietnam or the Philippines or India or wherever isn't tariffed. Then of course we'll need to apply tariffs to them, and so on.
Doesn't need to move production to Vietnam. Needs to move finished product to Vietnam and replace "Made in China" sticker with "Made in Vietnam" one.
As to the poor part, after Xi is done with dumping treasuries, and subsequent US default and USD cratering, the salaries would be on par on both sides of the ocean (as they should be).
Which would also automatically solve the illegal immigration problem. And fentanyl problem (no money no honey).
> They have all the talent because China is poor, still.
That’s why China has (somewhat) inexpensive labor. It does not explain why China has far more plastic engineering talent, electrical engineering talent, etc than the US.
They have more talent because that's where talent is needed. You don't staff factories with "talent", you staff them with labor. Then you need "talent" to design the process. It all feeds back. We used to have injection molding plastic experts in the US in the 70's! The technology was invented here. But they all retired and no one stepped in to replace them because those factories all closed down. Chinese kids picked up the slack.
The US wasn't sleeping though. We trained a generation of software engineering talent that remains the envy of the world. There are whole web sites devoted to this "Hacker" subculture, even. Maybe we can find one.
Seriously: there's no problem here. This is the way economies work.
5x the population and an education system that hasn't spent the last 50 years teaching science from the bible.
They have more engineers because they need more engineers
China really isn’t that poor anymore. A lot of their recent productivity gains are coming from automation, and they are leaning into harder than the Japanese did in the 90s.
Even with automation and high tech industry, their GDP per capita (both nominal and PPP) is equivalent to that of Mexico
The average household income in China is equivalent to making $17K salary in the US, and on average, Chinese work 25% more hours than Americans
Average home in their Tier 1 cities is 20x annual salary, compared to a 7x ratio in NYC
It's still pretty bleak for the average person there- you see that reflected in the "let it rot" youth movement online
I'm going to push back a bit here: things are improving, and China is already as rich as Mexico...now I get that American's have a unjustly bad impression of Mexico because of poverty at the not very populated border, but Mexico isn't a poor country, nor is Thailand, etc...these are all middle income countries that are quickly approaching high income countries.
Having lived in China for 9 years, and left 9 years ago, I can't really justify calling China poor anymore. Ya, they have a huge rural area and they still have lots of poor people, but they have a huge middle class (even if it isn't a majority of the country) that can afford a lot of things.
Chinese wages remain about 6-10x lower than US workers expect for the same kind of job. Whether that's "poor" or not is arguable. There are much poorer nations. Nonetheless US wage levels simply aren't going to compete, and it isn't even close.
Right. When I was working in China, I was only making about half as much as I do now at Google. The gap is much smaller for SWEs, even my local colleagues weren't making much less than I did. China is definitely an upper middle-income country, officially and just by looking at the numbers. They are breaking into being a lower high-income country next, and the graph really isn't slowing down.
But they are going off a demographic cliff, and that is why they are investing heavily in automation. They just won't have the people to do this work in the future, and expanding abroad and investing in robots are the only options for them.
> or wherever isn't tariffed.
Since he's even taxing empty islands, I doubt the end result will be anything else than either not selling to the US or selling to the US with a grey market.
If you put tariffs on the whole world, it's basically the same thing as a global economic sanction, similar to what Russia suffered.
We don't know what will happen in three days at this point.
In addition, by definition if the only way to bring manufacturing back to the US is by putting up import barriers, it means US manufacturing isn't competitive, domestically or globally.
Unless there is some hunker down period of isolation that'll make US manufacturing globally competitive somehow, all this will do in the long run is either isolate US manufacturers to the domestic market, or provide a temporary advantage that will disappear the minute the barriers are dropped.
Make that 145%. Until next week.
> That uncertainty does not create stable markets.
Stable markets with bad outcomes are not worth defending on stability alone.
> It does not create very accurate business decisions
The business environment is not great. It does seem some part of that is the result of cheap Chinese goods that have displaced labor _and_ environmental costs flooding foreign markets. That China even uses proxy countries to push out even more is instructive.
So, if not tariffs, then what should we use to solve this?
Oh I don’t know, how about:
Not imposing ludicrous tariffs based on flawed economics on the entire world at once?
Not imposing tariffs with no warning on your closest allies and attempting to bully them into submission?
Not imposing huge tariffs on some of the weakest nations you trade with (e.g. Laos, Vietnam).
Not changing trade policy radically every few days and announcing it on social media?
Not crashing the stock market, announcing a reverse on your social media platform, then boasting about how much money your billionaire friends made?
Not calling one of your largest trading partners peasants and the then very clever, alternating between insults and praise like a two-bit mobster?
This administration has made America a laughing stock; I don’t think many Americans realise just how much trust has been burned with allies since ‘liberation day’.
Allies saw Trump the first time around.
The simple fact Trump was voted in again denotes that the people of the US is not to be trusted.
At this point, it doesn't matter if Trump disappears into a void at the end of his term.
22% of people in the US voted directly for Trump. That's 22% of people that think his mode of operating is great presidential material.
I cannot trust doing business in a society with such a large proportion of either idiocy or malice, which includes wealthy and influential individuals!
The last 15 years has changed the fundamental stereotype of a US citizen. And while I personally know a few US citizens who are trustworthy, competent, lovely people, this marks an inherent bias in decision making.
From here, whatever Trump does is simply reinforcing the stereotype.
> The simple fact Trump was voted in again denotes that the people of the US is not to be trusted.
That might be the read, but it was people who were not happy with their lot in life and just saw same old same old as options while Trump was different. People in the US mostly don't think about the EU.
I guess they’ll find out why the rest of the world is important to them soon then.
While I'd like to think lessons are learned, they swallowed/supported outrageous claims up to this point.
Cognitive dissonance suggests they have to keep supporting the current regime and whatever it says,because to change their mind is to realise the horror of what they've done.
> based on flawed economics
It's a simple formula based on balance of trade.
> tariffs with no warning
Some Hacker News types like to bury their head in the sand when inconvenient political news occurs but to say this happened without warning simply flags you as part of this group.
> on some of the weakest nations you trade with (e.g. Laos, Vietnam).
There is room for these countries to buy more American goods. These two countries also rebadge and ship out a lot of Chinese goods to evade tariffs.
> changing trade policy radically every few days and announcing it on social media?
So, do you want warnings, or not?
> Not crashing the stock market, announcing a reverse on your social media platform, then boasting about how much money your billionaire friends made?
If you didn't make any trades during this period how was your portfolio actually impacted? I would assume this is the majority of non billionaire investors. So the only ones who lost in the crash were the same billionaires.
> calling one of your largest trading partners peasants and the then very clever, alternating between insults and praise like a two-bit mobster?
Does that trading partner also act like a two bit mobster? If so, wouldn't this just be turnabout, or why is deference to hostile economic partners justified?
> has made America a laughing stock
That's an absurdly biased point of view.
> I don’t think many Americans realise just how much trust has been burned with allies since ‘liberation day’.
Not much. They didn't actually "trust" us before. I'm not sure how you'd measure that anyways. From my reading of foreign news they're mostly taking it in stride, having seen this coming since last year, and not being particularly surprised by it. This zeitgeist only exists in half of America right now.
>They didn't actually "trust" us before. I'm not sure how you'd measure that anyways. From my reading of foreign news they're mostly taking it in stride, having seen this coming since last year, and not being particularly surprised by it. This zeitgeist only exists in half of America right now.
It's hard for me to overstate how wrong this is. In my country Denmark, everyone, everywhere is talking about this and people are generally worried. I hear it in the supermarkets. We absolutely did trust the US until now. For instance, the entire Danish public sector runs on Microsoft. Nobody ever considered that to be an issue. Now there is political talk about how that can be undone. Several of my peers who read HN and considered US-based, YC-backed to be the ultimate way to launch a startup are talking about the liability involved. Mind you, this is not the typical "I hate America!" rhetoric that has always existed to some degree everywhere, this is risk management: "Can I trust that the US is stable enough for me to bet on?"
You may not think it matters because the US is as strong as it is, or maybe you don't care. But the trust and thereby soft power that has been destroyed in these few months is generational.
> It's a simple formula based on balance of trade.
It certainly is simple.
> Does that trading partner also act like a two bit mobster?
The US is comparable to the dictatorship of Xi now? I suppose the new leadership style is similar.
> From my reading of foreign news…
The very high level of these tariffs and their global scope and speed of imposition was a huge surprise to (former) US allies, and even to many in the US.
PS I’m not American
> It's a simple formula based on balance of trade.
"Simple" is why it put 10% on an island with no humans and no manmade structures separately to the country which owns that island, and also tariffed another island that's technically British but which the British leased to the US military.
"Simple" isn't what you want to decide a complex trade policy for a complex economy.
> That's an absurdly biased point of view.
Hello, I'm in one of those foreign allies. We are, in fact, laughing at USA for shooting itself in the foot like this. On the other hand, the bit where Trump is also refusing to rule out military force to annex some of us? We take that seriously.
> Not much. They didn't actually "trust" us before. I'm not sure how you'd measure that anyways.
We used to hold the US in high regard. "Leaders of the free world" etc.
But also, relatively stable economic position, stable currency, reliable government that repaid debts, etc.
Even though Trump 1 happened, we knew it would come to an end, and we thought you would finally be over it — especially given how it ended.
Now, we don't. And many of us will be looking to China as a more reliable (for us) trading partner.
* Lower corporate income tax to the global minimum of 15%
* Reshoring incentives
* Regulatory reform to remove barriers to building things
* Strict export controls around AI, robotics, and fusion
* Massive subsides for production of useful humanoid robots and deployment of useful fusion power generation
To the extent that tariffs are considered at all, it should only be if they're implemented with bipartisan support, selective with specific strategic goals in mind, gradually phased in, and explicitly long-term policy. Extreme tariffs without clear staying power are just disruptive for no good reason. They won't change business behavior; they'll just temporarily jack up costs, create an unnecessary customs backlog, and roadblock some commercial activities entirely.
Even if implemented carefully, I would argue that tariffs in general are counterproductive in the long run. If a domestic industry isn't internationally competitive, the goal should be to fix that, not insulate it from competition.
> So, if not tariffs, then what should we use to solve this?
I’d argue that tariffs that increase at a known rate are better than surprise large ones. Even a 1% increase a week every Monday for a year lets everyone’s supply chain adjust gradually. You’ll know within a few weeks how your product is affected and you’ll plan for the increase over the year. That’s probably still too fast though, since factories take time to build and the whole point is to encourage local manufacturing. Given the 4 year term trump could have gone for 3 years of increases with the hope that companies would start building factories and have them running by year 4.
Maybe start with smaller tariffs and go from there. But its not even worth defending current administration policies. Its either completely stupid or deliberately malevolent.
On what basis are you making this recommendation? Your personal experience negotiating nation-state level agreements between two hegemons?
There is a deluge of experts in economics and other fields who clearly state this is not the right approach to bringing manufacturing to the US. Why wouldn't we trust experts in their fields?
What makes them experts in their fields? They have never done anything like this. Nor are historical analogues abundant.
That probably means its not a good strategy. Look at business activity, people are comparing it to early covid business conditions but its entirely self inflicted. You don't need to be an expert to see this is a failure. The assumption shouldn't be that Trump is acting in the interest of the average American or the American government.
If an entrepreneur is smart enough to figure out how to land a rocket ship on its feet, that person can figure out how to manufacture printed circuit boards economically in the US.
One is a fight against nature; the other — to make it economic — is a fight against all the other highly skilled entrepreneurs not in the USA.
Single player, multiplayer.
I'll add that the elites who pushed for earlier trade deals often did it specifically to get rich selling off America's domestic manufacturing and many jobs. Now, countries like China have them.
So, Trump's policies should be seen as an attempt to reverse for Americans' benefit damaging policies from before which are still active. Now, whether that will do good or harm in the long term is anyone's guess. We already see companies investing more in American infrastructure, though.
As one of the “skilled electronics engineers” in the US you could count on US soil (whatever that means) I can tell you this article reads very strangely to a EE.
“we were able to take all those designs and spin up our own SMT, it's called Surface Mount Technology”
“run that through our surface mount technology by our line operators”
“meaning the printed circuit board or PCBA assembly”
So, he’s definitely not an EE. No EE talks like this when they are trying to explain the nuts and bolts to a lay person. Either that or the editor took liberties they shouldn’t have.
No one ever said he was an EE?
It's a transcript of an informal podcast interview with - clearly - a marketing guy who may or may not have 'engineer' in his title.
I've worked with dozens of guys like this over the years. They could elegantly bullshit their way through any discussion. They had an answer for every question, even when they didn't.
There's a reason they don't send the design engineers to trade shows.
Steve Jobs was one of these people. A clever marketing guy who relied on others for technical heavy lifting. I suggest going back and re-watching some of his presentations, like the unveiling of the iPhone. Every word he said was meticulously planned and very rehearsed.
Not that any of that matters, because engineering is a team sport, and that's where taking this too literally becomes a problem. Just how like a football team is made up of different skills and varying physical builds. The reason they don't send the design engineers to the conventions is because they are too honest and will spill the beans on the product's shortcomings, or inundate the customer with irrelvant details.
> * Steve Jobs was one of these people. A clever marketing guy who relied on others for technical heavy lifting. I suggest going back and re-watching some of his presentations, like the unveiling of the iPhone. Every word he said was meticulously planned and very rehearsed.*
Before Apple entered its iPod era, Jobs could do a reasonable job of taking questions from a technical audience
https://youtu.be/yQ16_YxLbB8?si=GK5NvbyND1xriiYm
No single person on this planet can know everything about a product as complex as a phone or any other modern device, and the expectation of some people form execs even ones who were engineers is simply unrealistic.
If you know everything about your product down to the most low level technical detail your product is either a brick (and I think that even that is too complicated) or you greatly overestimate what you actually know.
> because they are too honest and will spill the beans on the product's shortcomings, or inundate the customer with irrelvant details
Yeah, getting upset an EE who has the skills to build a cellphone from scratch isn't actually moonlighting as a writer doing a blogspam version of a podcast interview fits that quite well
Steve Jobs was not a marketing guy. If anything, he was a designer. His technical knowledge was also way beyond most CEOs. He designed his presentations with a high attention to detail just like he designed his products, product ranges and companies. If you watch any one of the many interviews he gave you'll see that he can talk off-the-cuff, in depth on all kinds of subjects. And, unlike many modern CEOs, he pauses to think before opening his mouth.
Steve Jobs was one of these people. A clever marketing guy who relied on others for technical heavy lifting.
That's the currently-fashionable revisionist history. But the truth of the matter, from his contemporaries, was that he knew is stuff. He was also good at marketing.
I suggest going back and re-watching some of his presentations,
I suggest going back and re-reading some of the print interviews he gave to technical publications. There's no question he knew what he was talking about.
> But the truth of the matter, from his contemporaries, was that he knew is stuff.
Read anything on folklore.org, and you can see that's not really the case. He prescribes a lot of stuff that they just had to get around, typical pointy haired boss stuff.
> A clever marketing guy who relied on others for technical heavy lifting
We can call product design "marketing" but that's a bit like calling Linus Torvalds a "code monkey"...
Steve Jobs was not a product designer. He emphasized design, but he didn't design almost anything himself.
I think that's a very myopic view of what Jobs did. I am of the opinion he was one of the greatest designers of all time.
Just because he didn't move pixels across the screen doesn't mean he wasn't setting the design language, defining taste, sweating detail and holding the vision. No-one would suggest that a show-runner didn't make TV, or that a director wasn't a filmmaker. Jony Ive's design changed (and improved) immensely one he was working closely with Jobs. Once Jobs was gone things drifted. Similarly Pixar was hyper-focused under Jobs then began to drift as soon as he was no longer involved.
Visionary and Product Designer are different jobs. Generalize them as the same thing if you like, but he was a CEO and a visionary. He didn't design products, he criticized and made demands of the designers.
There are even more than a million of those in SZ haha
You're just jealous. These guys have spun up their own RoHS and are doing a 100% EDA automation with full Verilog over there. By doing the reflow process (it's a way of building integrated circuits) they're able to offer complete impedance right here in the USA.
Before retirement my father was employed in a company certifying medical devices.
Half the descriptions provided by those who made the devices were this sort of word salad because they concerned products which were obvious scams[0].
On person in particular was editing the description on the fly and was looking for a word so dad jokingly suggested "impedance". "Yes, thank you!" replied that person - her face lighting up as she added the word.
[0] Like a vacuum cleaner which was supposed to dispense a mist of medication. Initially rejected as there was no dosage control whatsoever, but I heard that eventually somehow it was certified.
Go back to /r/vxjunkies/, and take your retro-encabulator with you :Þ
In case anyone need it.
https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/4zzfp4/what_i...
I was fully expecting "inverse reluctance" to make an appearance somewhere in there.
Too much impedance is outsourced to Asia these days …
It's a complex problem, there's a lot of resistance from consumers who react badly to the price of domestic goods. Maybe tariffs will induce more demand, but I'm not sure the capacity is there in the first place.
You can reduce the resistance if you outsource to two countries in parallel.
It gets complex once an accumulator is involved.
It's not really a problem of "resistance", it's more about purchasing power, common and avoiding feeling ripped off.
People buy stuff competitively and that's it. There are modifiers, notably being rich enough that regular items prices make no difference to you, so you can buy all from your own country without affecting you too much.
But even if you are middle class, buying most items at a higher price just because they are from your country is just a waste of money from an individual utilitarian point of view. It directly affects people and they always favor that, even if in the long run doing so might have a second order effect that will affect them in worse ways.
Tariffs, taxations and special legislation is actually the only way to make some product competitive for your own country. Especially when they are a participant in the trade willing to take a hit just to corner the market. This is basically what China did for many things, so here we are...
Maybe an EE can rectify the the situation.
Yeah I think OP should relax, do some yoga or meditating. Repeat with me: Ohmmmm
You couldn't resist it could you.
Not sure watt you guys are on about. Not to be too negative here or polarise the debate, but I remember the electrifying experience as a child to source local products instead of relying on imports from faraday countries. I guess technology has lost some of its radiance and has just become a mains to an end, to feed the addiction.
It must be insulating to be so cagey. Does it hertz?
~relying~ --> relaying
I'm hoping it induces the reversal in reckless culture of consumption and waste and longer end-product life cycles on the companies that design and manufacture them.
That could be tested with a Vector Demand Analyzor.
Amazing. I'm not an EE and the first half of that sentence had be believing you.
I hope you're joking - what you wrote makes no sense at all.
Thanks. I hate it.
Have my upvote.
You're mixing your processes - is he making his own circuit boards (reflow) or making his own chips (verilog) - and I have no idea what "complete impedance" even means in this context - HN really needs to stop AI posting here
Buddy that was exactly the joke. I do proudly make up my own nonsense without relying on AI, though.
Genuine home grown artisanal nonsense, delivered by devices assembled in China.
The tariffs on that must be astronomical.
tdeck is making fun of the way the article is written.
Woosh
tbf, GP could have had just a bit more absurdity to clarify it has been a joke.
GP was a joke, mate.
We really should not be doing jokes like this in times like these where the US president makes those kinds of remarks on a daily basis while being 100% serious
Yes, the President has thrown down a very respectable challenge to absurdists everywhere.
Trump is not all bad, I mean, he makes guys like me look like fucking geniuses.
Indeed.
There's a somewhat better discussion of this phone here.[1] At least the making of the board. Board manufacture, SMT pick and place, and soldering are all automated, and the equipment is widely available. Everybody does boards roughly the same way.
The assembly problems in phones come from all the non-board parts. See this iPhone teardown.[2] Look at all those little subassemblies. Some are screwed down. Some use elastic adhesive. Some are held in place by other parts. They're connected by tiny flexible printed circuits. That's the labor-intensive part. Usually involves lots of people with tweezers and magnifiers. They don't show that.
So here's that part of assembly in a phone factory in India.[3] Huge workforce.
For comparison, here's a Samsung plant.[4] More robots, fewer people. Samsung made something like 229 million phones in 2024. If a US company produced phones at Samsung volumes, the price would come down.
[1] https://puri.sm/posts/manufacturing-the-librem-5-usa-phone-i...
[2] https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/iPhone+13+Pro+Teardown/14492...
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQZycjXZAKI
[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQ5t7zgoQRM
There's another way to do it. Here's a teardown of a classic Nokia "brick" phone.[1] That's designed for automated low-cost vertical assembly. The case provides the basic structure, and everything can be put into the case with a vertical push. There are no internal wires to connect. There are simple machines for that kind of assembly. Then everything gets squeezed together, and you have a hard block of an object that's hard to damage.
If you can design something which can be assembled in that simple way, high-volume manufacturing can be automated cheaply. Smartphones are not built from parts intended to be assembled in that way, but that's a decision based on cheap labor, not one that's inherent in smartphone design.
Design for assembly was more of a thing when manufacturing was in the US. The Macintosh IIci was designed for vertical assembly. Everything installed with a straight-down move. The power supply outputs were stakes that engaged clips on the motherboard. No internal wiring.
Then Apple gave up on US manufacturing.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xglr0Zy8s8
The trade-off of the current smartphone assembly process (many parts and many steps) is driven by numerous factors, including cheap labor. It also considers: incremental design improvement, testing, defects, supply chain, model differenciation, ...
"but that's a decision based on cheap labor, not one that's inherent in smartphone design"
This is the heart of the matter. The US has abandoned skills because cheap labor in Asia. An example from the story about dealing with touch screen tests: they're employing disposable workers to toy with pinch and zoom testing; something easily automated with a simple machine and image comparisons. How sad. This is an actual regression in technology.
If the US wants to get manufacturing back, the only areas that matter are electronics and, to a lesser extent, machinery. See this chart.[1] That's an achievable goal.
Here's a useful smartphone that could become big:
- Solid state battery that will last at least 5 years.
- 5 year full warranty.
- No connectors. Inductive charging only.
- Screen as unbreakable as possible.
- Sealed unit. No holes in case. Filled with inert gas at factory.
- Totally unmaintainable.
- US $199.95.
[1] https://tradingeconomics.com/china/exports/united-states
>Then Apple gave up on US manufacturing.
Then Tim Cook gave up on manufacturing. Which was how it saved Apple.
Steve Jobs always had a somewhat fantasise vision of dark factory. He wasn't able to accomplish that when Apple was still fighting for survival. But now Apple has more cash then it knows what to do with it.
a bit of the problem is that modern elements like display + touch screen require a lot more bandwidth than 3110 - for example the displays require ridiculous bandwidth in comparison to the nokia, like 10 gigabit/s for Samsung Galaxy S25 (basic model, not plus/ultra), plus connectors for the cameras.
At the very least you can't really make the screen soldered-on, and the simple connectors used in Nokia might not work out for such high bandwidth use case. Same with cameras.
Thin ribbon connectors are one of the hardest things to automate from what I remember regarding Sony's efforts to automate PS5 manufacture.
> If a US company produced phones at Samsung volumes, the price would come down.
The problem is, there are no Western manufacturers left that have the brand loyalty to bring such a large volume of purchases to the table.
The giants are so giant, it's almost impossible to compete with them in the consumer mass market. The only way you can outcompete the giants is by focusing on tiny small niches where consumers are willing and able to pay a premium - the government (auditable supply chains) and eco-progressives. That's where Tesla started, that's where Purism and Frame.work live.
> The giants are so giant, it's almost impossible to compete with them in the consumer mass market
Chicken, egg
Yeah, but it didn't have to be that way. We failed to uphold anti-trust acts and now are faced with this issue.
It didn't have to be this way, but anti-trust is not the sole reason.
>More robots, fewer people.
It would be amusing if after all this turmoil the work came back to the US but it barely increased manufacturing employment.
Your scenario is more like a best-case option, actually. I mean currently there are only 13M people employed in manufacturing in the US [0], while output is at an all time high [1]. The vast majority of this manufacturing is dependent on components imported from other countries - which just got much more expensive. So even if employment in manufacuturing would increase by 20% (unrealistic IMO), that would only translate to 2.6M people - while at the same time losing multiples of that in better-paid jobs in other industries, mostly services.
[0] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/manemp [1] https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/USA/uni...
I think you might even lose a bunch of these jobs, at least in the short term, as businesses now need to free up money (they likely hadn't planned to initially) to pay for tariffs before their goods / parts are auctioned off at the port. That's even before consumer spending tightens up due to rising prices, and declining stocks.
Pretty much guaranteed. The goal of modern automation isn't more people it's less. People love to spout "but the industrial revolution just made people able to do more jobs". But the goal of modern automation is to _replace all jobs_ that it can.
Then you hire 4 guys to maintain all the automation between 5 factories they drive between as needed.
Yes, that's what civilization -> industrialization -> automation does: eliminate jobs, which opens up opportunities for new jobs.
you are no longer an animal spending most of your waking life searching for food, nor do you build your own shelter, make your own clothes, construct tools, etc
yes, automation seeks to eliminate factory jobs, most of them are pretty awful anyway. this opens up new options as every step along the way always has
and yes, the change isn't always easy for the folks that have to find something new
The goal isn’t actually specifically employment increases, that’s mostly a marketing strategy, the real goal is national security. US, Japan, and South Korea seem to have decided enough is enough with Chinese aspirations and threats to Taiwan, so US has convinced them to build additional capacity in the US and also to have those nations increase defense spending. Notice Japan has started joining NATO command and participating in NATO missions. I predict Japan will the be first “deal” announced by Trump administration, with South Korea soon afterwards. It makes sense for these allies, the logic is we should fortify our supply lines building redundant facilities in US homeland which is much harder for China to disrupt and attack, you guys start buying lots of F-47s, we start massive ship building, re-industrialize as rapidly as possible. Then should China try anything and somehow mess you guys up, the US will come back a get you out of it.
That would be sane, but it makes no sense then why Trump is threatening tarrifs on Canada or the EU - both places that also need to do the same. (move manufacturing out of China)
Sure it does. The strategy is based on chaos and reminding all the world, allies included that the US is in charge and they want some very specific changes from both Canada and EU, they need them to militarize quickly, the US military is furious that all their allies appear to be almost incapable, very little naval power specifically. I’d even argue the implied threat to leave NATO, the talk of annexation of Canada and Greenland, it’s all strategic psychological warfare on allies to shock them into action … and it’s working … take a look a Germany’s new military budget and plans. There is also an intentional devaluation of the dollar to assist in re-industrialization. This is all national security and world order driven, not economics, and it’s actually the optimal time during a strong domestic US economy to try to make these changes.
It's national security to destroy all of your alliances? In that case, what is the reason Russia is exempt from these tariffs? Reverse-psychological warfare?
First of all there is (EDIT: almost) zero trade between the US and Russia currently, same with North Korea. (EDIT: perhaps some token signal of wanting to negotiate over Ukraine? or perhaps even more “sinister” - getting US political opposition to falsely argue Trump is a Russian agent and make themselves look silly)
Second, yes part of the strategy is to force allies to self assess themselves and their dependence on US power. Trump and Nixon had a personal relationship and his fundamental strategy in business is based on creating uncertainty, it’s literally like point 1 of his “Art of the Deal” and however another part of that strategy is being willing to walk away.
We are living through a turning point in history where current US administration has reversed the open policy to China and for national security reasons are working to re-industrialize and militarize quickly as a strategy to deter Chinese ambitions.
It’s fine to disagree and argue the neoliberalism strategy of globalism isn’t dead but politically it is. Of course that world order is fighting to survive where it can, UK, France, Germany all putting up resistance to the rise of neo-mercantilism and nationalism but we will see if canceling elections, restrictions on speech and jailing politicians will work to block it.
>First of all there is zero trade between the US and Russia currently, same with North Korea.
No, there is trade, $3.5b worth of it. But even if there wasn't, why would they get an explicit exemption?
> First of all there is zero trade between the US and Russia currently
Not true. The US imported 3.5 billion dollars of goods from Russia in 2024, and exported 500 million dollars of goods.
https://ustr.gov/countries-regions/europe-middle-east/russia...
Maybe one change, but there is far too much going on and thus diverting attention. Pick something and fix it, not a million things and divide your attention and thus get nothing done. (not that other presidents were better, but part of that is good change is slow in many cases)
It won’t come back, as it never were in the US.
I don't buy that [3] is bad and [4] is good examples. That Samsung plant reel doesn't show the same parts of assembly as the first one - I bet those videos are just focusing on different parts of fundamentally identical factories.
I was going to skip this article until I read your post, it got me curious. You're totally right, it does read really weird. It made me laugh a bit, I needed that this morning. Thanks!
I have also "spun up my own SMT". It's a 50 USD hot air rework station and maybe 20$ of consumables in a 4 meter square workshop (I live in Asia). It would be challenging, but possible, for me to assemble the PCBs in their photographs by hand. There are indeed a lot of people like me.
He certainly meant an "SMT line", because phones assembled on a manual station in the USA (outside of shit quality) would cost well in excess of $2000.
> There are indeed a lot of people like me.
Are there a lot of people like you that are willing to do this as a minimum wage job? Because that's the real ask.
They might, if their expectations are as simple as an on ramp to better or more stable things. It would also make sense for those who are using this method for career change.
I have a coworker who "couldn't hack it" as a paralegal and is now working in the line for server assembly. Or another coworker who came from a major daytrading firm to work quality control with me.
That’s not what they do. As Tim Cook said multiple times the engineers are needed as floor and line managers, to coordinate parts of the process, to set up new lines quickly etc… those are not the ones doing the actual soldering.
Do what? There are literally thousands of shops here in SZ where ppl are manually hot air reworking phone pcbs 24/7. For maybe 150 dollar a month?
I can hot air rework a component on a phone too.
I won't assemble an entire smartphone this way unless I need to kill a lot of time and don't have anything better to do.
How hard can it be? Just tell them where to put the solder.
There's more to it https://factcheck.afp.com/doc.afp.com.33R86KF
It extrapolates broadly. It's kind of a funny thing. When somebody doesn't know much about something but wants to pretend they do, their vocabulary comes off sounding like a thesaurus of vernacular, but when you speak to somebody who genuinely knows something, to the point of having an intuitive feeling/understanding of it, they could easily explain, at least roughly, even the most esoteric topic in a relatable enough language that a high schooler could understand.
Space stuff is another domain that's just chock full of this.
I don't think this is true. Knowing something well and being able to explain it in simple terms are unrelated skills. Plenty of people who know their domain super well just can't explain to lay person.
You're right. Recently there was a thread about how some (many?) people know a field well but can't teach well, and some people know and teach well.
What, you’ve never dip switched the manufacturing process despite investor resistors?
Quick, fetch the firewall extinguisher! The AmeriPad is having an unplanned thermal excursion!
The interviewee is described as "Purism's founder", who even says "we took our own electronics engineers (EEs)", implying (though not explicitly stating) he doesn't include himself in that category.
I do think there's an interesting conversation to have here though about workforce management, as someone who lives in adjacent worlds.
If you are long term greedy, like China, a great strategy to capture dominance of a discipline would be along the lines of how to boil a frog. Start by sending grad students to the top universities, ensuring they work for the PIs for cheap, bring as many of them back to China as you can, but tolerate a leaky return path so as not to stir up notice. Advertize their high post-training employment rate back to the universities to keep their valves open even as you start developing your universities internally, and eventually throttle down the outbound grad student pipeline. At some point after it's too late, the top universities, and their countries, look around, bemoan the lack of people in their discipline, and then just give up because by now they're old and tired.
Seems like something that has happened in chemistry, physics, and EE for sure. Once you start thinking this way, all sorts of things start making sense. Like maybe they looked at solar as a cheap, low threat point of entry for developing silicon fabrication capabilities. Software engineering, being a relatively soft skill, comes along for the ride.
Not sure about other fields, but if AI can take on a rapidly increasing set of fields, you start seeing this as how China primarily harvests not IP but workforce training from the global West, then technologies happen to fall out, then one day China has solved for their own graying work force at the same time they've solved for global economic dominance.
And a non-trivial contributor was the US governments (I blame the states too) defunding education.
This is an interesting suggestion. I'm curious what you mean by "sending grad students to top universities": 1.) the target universities have to accept the students, right? 2.) This implies some top-level RTS-game-esque control of the grad students when, in reality, they're making independent choices (albeit influenced by many factors, including govt promotion) 3.) Seems like the rational decision for ambitious grad students is to apply to said top universities (which may just happen to be abroad).
Same for "bringing many of them back": I read it at first like it was akin to some sort of spy agent network when in reality "bringing back" probably means various incentives, not some forced thing. Carrot, instead of stick.
1) target universities have to accept the students
Yes! Which the US incentivizes by a) underfunding K-12 education, reducing the internal applicant pool, b) competing grants in a way that incentivizes PIs to grasp for cheap labor. Additionally, the individual states also incentivize this. Look at the UC's own statistics: since 2009 the highest chance of acceptance goes to foreign, ethnically Asian applicants. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20321493
2) RTS-game-esque control of the grad students
Yes! Having been in the room when one of those grad students got a very stressful call from home (like broke down crying multiple times), it's definitely not all carrots. And the removal of carrots eventually looks like a stick.
3) Seems like the rational decision for ambitious grad students
Yes! No amplification needed.
A quick Google search shows that there are somewhere in the range of 20,000 electrical engineers who graduate US universities every year. Even if not all of them do electronics, and not all of the ones are considered “skilled” (by this author’s definition), there are not a “countable” amount.
... that seems to be, a really small number. I always thought it's going to be way more.
I mean that’s just one STEM major—-there are way more engineers!
I think the journalist think the people who solder components in a assembly line are Engineers.
My guess: The guy who paid the bill for the Hanwha surface mount machines was interviewed.
He is originally a software engineer that only later started a hardware company
My read on this that they don't mean EEs as in IEEE, but "engineer" as in "sanitation engineer", i.e. people who assemble electronic devices in factories.
"PCBA assembly" is up there with "IQ quotient" and "ROI on investment". No editor writes like that either.
The audio of the interview is on the page. The "Surface Mount Technology" bit is at 7 minutes in.
I suspect this is a case of Gell-Mann amnesia. This article is not inconsistent with the quality of articles in blogs, the news etc. I believe you (And I) notice this due to expertise in the area.
Interesting. It is impressive that they almost managed to do 100% made in the USA, judging by the "Table of Origin". However the table doesn't really cover all the details down to the components, so I'm wondering where he sourced every small details.
He did include one paragraph on the website:
"Individual components used in fabrication are sourced direct from chip makers and parts distributors."
For reference, the table is on this page: https://puri.sm/products/liberty-phone/?ref=404media.co
Todd Weaver is vastly exaggerating how special, innovative, and skilled Librem is. Their components are largely sourced from overseas, through domestic distributors, which is the norm for electronics manufacturers; overseas distributors are often precluded from international sales by agreements with their suppliers. There are also far more skilled electronics designers in the USA than he seems to think.
Source: I am an embedded developer, who works on a research, design, and development team which includes electronics engineers, and works on products manufactured in the same facility.
> There are also far more skilled electronics designers in the USA than he seems to think.
Second this. The Liberty Phone PCBA isn't even that exotic as far as modern designs go. The NXP SoC (CPU) it uses is a common part with a rather pedestrian ball pitch. A board like this is within the reach of countless trained EEs here, but they're usually happily employed at companies with higher volumes and margins. This often translates to a perception that they don't exist in the US market when low-budget companies go looking.
I thought the phrasing of "western distributor" was shady. I'm like doesn't that just mean the person ordering and distrusting the parts is "in the west" (not even necessarily US) but the parts could be from anywhere? It's not saying much at all.
>"Individual components used in fabrication are sourced direct from chip makers and parts distributors."
I suspect most of those are from overseas. A lot of that stuff just isn't made in the US. I don't know why they are shady about it, they should just be honest and denote which stuff isn't available at all in the US and which stuff isn't available at reasonable costs in the US.
Are there any other ways to source components?
> It has 4 GB of memory, and reviewers say that its specs are pretty outdated.
In my imaginary world, I wish someone stood up to this type of insanity. This would be a good time to force Apple / Google to revive old devices and allow the supply chains to adjust manufacturing things outside of China while the rest of the world pauses and lives with some outdated hardware technology. I know this is probably not feasible because Apple and Google probably survive on selling of new phones, but hey I can at least dream!
In this case, part of the criticism is that the phone doesn't function well. Even when it was new, it was slow and clunky, and the issue seemed to be the CPU wasn't up to the task. They may have optimized it a bit since, but fundamentally they chose an under-powered CPU to hit certain open source requirements.
I agree though that for many things (such as their laptop), specs often don't matter. Either I need a high-end, GPU accelerated computer, or I need a terminal. Having the newest CPU doesn't matter if it achieves other desired goals.
> and the issue seemed to be the CPU wasn't up to the task.
This is definitely not true, the issue is in the non-optimized software. I tried SXMo [0] on a Pinephone (which is much slower than the Librem), and it was unbelievably fast, including watching videos and looking a maps in a split-screen mode, simultaneously and smoothly. Android had 10 years and a huge team of developers to optimize the UI.
[0] https://sxmo.org/
Sxmo is based on a keyboard-driven tiling window manager. Yes, it is as bad as it sounds. Touch gestures suck so much[1] that the most comfortable way to navigate it is with the volume buttons and power button. Each of these buttons has like 3 different functions with double, tripple click etc. Changing the volume is not one of the functions[2].
Auto screen orientation only works 50% of the time, because the whole thing is based on a pile of shell scripts.
There is no lock screen included.
No, I'm not kidding.
[1] https://sxmo.org/docs/gettingstarted/
[2] https://man.sr.ht/~anjan/sxmo-docs/USERGUIDE.md#strongglobal...
It's just an example that the UI on a Pinephone and Librem 5 can definitely be snappy given enough optimizations.
Related: https://puri.sm/posts/the-danger-of-focusing-on-specs/
Are you going to use a 10 years old phone just because it still receives software updates? If so, good for you, but overwhelming majority of people will opt buying a new one.
Why buy a new phone when old one still receives updated and has a working battery? Honest question, I only replaced my old phone because it stopped getting security updated. Up to some limit, ancient nokia wouldn't work well, but i would gladly use my pixel from 2018.
What's the point in buying a new phone when the old one works flawlessly and continues to receive not only security updates but also all software improvements, and is getting more optimized and fast with time? Sent from my Librem 5.
consumers were taught that and they can be taught something different
There are plenty of EEs in the good ol' US of A, they're just working as software engineers at the moment out of necessity, since there aren't really any EE jobs here, outside the defense sector and a few large companies.
But that is beside the point since it's not "EE" that's being done in China. It's manufacturing and assembly of US designs. And that is where there's real shortage - skilled labor that can do that. The actual work is mostly done by robots, but before it _is_ done by robots, manufacturing capacity needs to be designed and built. Under the best circumstances (e.g. unlimited Apple resources in India) this takes years.
From the article: "If you scoured the United States, you would be able to probably actually still count the number of skilled electronics engineers. If you go to Shenzhen, there's floor after floor after floor after floor of skilled EE's"
> And that is where there's real shortage - skilled labor that can do that.
Rather: cheap (US) labor that can do that. :-)
I don't even think it's the cost. The actual formerly labor-intensive work is mostly done by robots now (save for e.g. the garment industry which is still only very partially automated). It's just that anything in the physical world takes time and effort. As software engineers we're used to quick iteration cycles in everything. It might not seem to you that they are "quick", but compared to the physical world they are. I was first exposed to this when I worked for a "mostly hardware" company that also designs chips. They were going to introduce some features into the chips that I needed on the software side, and when asked about the timeline they said "3-4 years". Not a typo. That's how it is in hardware. I have no reason to believe that the timelines are substantially shorter in large scale high tech manufacturing - it's just the nature of the thing. You fuck something up, you can't just patch it, you have to re-do it, and that takes time and $$$.
Be all of that as it may, we still _have_ to revitalize the "real" segment of our industry, no matter the cost.
> As software engineers we're used to quick iteration cycles in everything. It might not seem to you that they are "quick", but compared to the physical world they are.
That's also partly because (physical world) engineers don't invest the same intense effort to enable quick iteration cycles for their area as software engineers do. I cannot say whether this is a "culture problem" of engineering disciplines, or managers don't see a huge economic value that this would enable, and thus don't allow engineers to work on such topics.
I at least somewhat know what I am talking about, since when I had to get used to some CAD program, I really felt set back by decades in comparison what are standard practices in software development. A little bit like the difference between programming in a modern programming language and programming in Excel.
Thus, in some sense I am impressed by (e.g. mechanical) engineers who despite all this actually are capable to accomplish creating a product (and I do believe that if the practices improved, they could do so much more).
It's more fundamental than this, IMO. No matter how much you invest into faster iteration cycles, physical world just takes a long time, and the worst part is, you either have to get some very complicated thing right the first time, or add a sufficient buffer to your plans. Discovered a bug in your chip after initial tapeout? Add months to the schedule. Too much RF crosstalk in the PCB? Add a couple of weeks at least. Take Apple for example. Do you think they didn't invest into faster iterations? I'm sure they did. And each chip still takes 3+ years there, too. Qualcomm? About 3 years. Google? Also about 3 years (I heard of the upcoming 192GB TPU being developed over 2 years ago when I was there; it was announced this week). The "innovations" that they are talking about today were actually decided 3 years ago. 3 years ago was a very different time, of course.
There's also another problem when it comes to chips. On the higher end, you have to design for the technological processes that don't yet exist. E.g. 2nm did not exist 3 years ago, yet the design of the chips that use it was done back then. You're also doing it with bleeding edge tooling.
I can't believe people still buy the Purism scam after all these years...I ordered a Librem 5 and a Pinephone back in the days of the other supply chain story(Covid). The Pinephone flew in from China in less than 2 months; the Librem 5 took more than 4 years to arrive. All Purism offered during that time were "opportunities" to invest and exhausting delay stories about failing supply chains, while keeping their customers completely in the dark about their order state. Instead of preying on the goodwill of FOSS enthousiasts, they now try to tap into a new market (nationalism) to sell the same useless overpriced brick to.
Purism laptops were great when I was a customer. Very sad they couldn't fix the issues you're talking about. I wanted to support the company further, and I think they are doing sincere, good, important work, especially on the software side. But these communication and customer relationship issues didn't get better and I switched away.
> Very sad they couldn't fix the issues you're talking about.
Which issues? The phones were shipped, albeit with a long delay. Now, you can buy and get them quickly.
Sent from my Librem 5 daily driver.
Communication and customer relations issues. My experience, and that of many others online, was that Purism was not transparent or apparently honest about things like timelines and delays. People also had problems with getting Purism to honor refunds, warranties (I had this issue), and similar, exacerbated by communication. This continued to happen over a period of years.
I'm not here to relitigate the whole Purism saga. I bought 4 Purism products, was one of the first people in the world to own a Librem 5, I invested (donated?). I love the company mission, I think it's fantastic that you're daily driving a Librem 5. But I'm not ready to engage again myself, and that's too bad, but I think a lot of people ended up feeling the same way.
> Purism was not transparent or apparently honest about things like timelines and delays
Yes, they did have huge refund and shipping time issues and I don't trust their time estimations anymore. They almost went bankrupt and couldn't issue refunds for a long time. However this is irrelevant today, as their devices are finally available to order and AFAIK the refunds were issued. There were never issues with security, backdoors (unlike Lenovo, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superfish#Lenovo_security_inci...), nonfree software or the like.
The issue is pretty obvious to most normal people. My ex bought a Purism phone and laptop, said he would switch to Linux the moment they arrived at his doorstep. He ended up buying a new Macbook and iPhone before any of his Purism hardware started shipping. He might still be using the Apple hardware too.
I love FOSS as much as the next guy but you're being outright facetious if you can't see Purism's problem.
Purism did have a lot of problems with delayed shipping. Today it's just not true though.
While I'm not going to defend Purism the company, I just wanted to note I listen to MP3s on a daily basis using that useless overpriced brick I acquired used from ebay.
There was an option to pay like $20 for literally nothing just to support the idea of an open source phone. I did so many years ago.
Worst $20 I ever spent. The amount of spam I've gotten as an "investor" is fucking ridiculous. The amount of times I've opened my email to see an "investment opportunity" from Todd Weaver (originating from multiple email addresses, no functional way to unsubscribe) is downright insulting.
From the bottom of my heart: fuck Todd Weaver, whose name is at the bottom of hundreds of spam emails I've received going back years.
Did you try to unsubscribe? They mention such possibility in their every email.
I'd be happy to provide dozens of examples in my inbox that prove otherwise, and that's just the ones that have escaped my spam folder over the years.
I can also provide you with examples of other people's less than flattering replies about the exact same issue that have somehow reached my inbox (I'm assuming due to a brief misconfiguration).
> Instead of preying on the goodwill of FOSS enthousiasts, they now try to tap into a new market (nationalism)
Designing and selling the only existing phone made in USA, when everything is produced in China and has a risk of containing backdoors, is as far from nationalism as it gets. (And I'm not an American.) It's true innovation and an offer of a peace of mind for activists and journalists. Even though the USA turns into something bad, the phone runs an FSF-endorsed distro and provides schematics, so you can verify everything yourself (or rely on the community). You comment looks disingenuous to me.
In the USA, 'Liberty' is now a strong nationalist dog whistle.
> and an offer of a peace of mind for activists and journalists
Sounds like a trap.
They invented name "Liberty Phone" before Trump made this a thing. Perhaps they should rename it, I don't know. What I know is that this modern device is as free (as in freedom) as it gets today for modern devices.
>We always were sort of maintaining two different bills of materials of Chinese componentry and Western componentry because they're different. Then we produced five different iterations of the Librem 5 phone through Chinese contract manufacturing. And we iterated through those five changes over the course of about 18 months. At that point, we finally had a production ready product. And then we were able to take everything that we did and bring it to US soil.
How many iterations can they get done in US in 18 months? That's what's going to kill Made in USA, if you can't get the design done on time, not a few $100 extra in PRC vs west sourced BOM, but millions more spent on development over longer time frame because lack of talent. Is the short/medium term solution still to send "homework" to Chinese prototype teams? I suppose economics of PRC speed and few prototypes > 100%+ tariffs.
Engineers in the US would be able to get five iterations done using US fabs and assembly too, it’d just cost a ton more to get the same lead times and pay for the NRE.
Last time I worked on something of this complexity in 2019, 1 week turn around prototypes would cost $2-5k for the assembled PCBs from China but $30-50k in the US. It also took a bit more effort and inventory to make sure all the parts were stocked or shipped on time, which is a problem when you can’t visit Shenzhen’s malls if you’re missing a part. Once the first iteration was done, we were averaging between one and two months per revision. It’s very doable but nobody except medical, defense, and aerospace are willing to pay the price.
Kind of a pointless debate point (and economic plan) as it will always come down to humans and market conditions. Where the humans are who specialize and have deep experience in that stuff chose to work. You cant really fake that stuff via subsidization over long periods without also having all the other pieces of the market in place (all the way from low level workers to capital markets to regulatory environments and even attractive living costs)... otherwise Canada and EU would have grown a larger tech industry by now via their gov programs.
There has to be strong organic production and only then can gov help tip the scales upward, instead of generating it from thin air at the top level. If no one is fleeing China to do it in the US the same way people fled American market conditions to build stuff in Asia it won't happen.
Creating a forced siloed market through tariffs is probably the least efficient and most expensive method to achieving it. But it can plausibly if the domestic market gets used to not buying the nice things the rest of the world has for a decade (similar to what western gov is choosing to do with banning Chinese EVs but applied a thousandfold).
More of a tongue in cheek comment. Gone are the days of "designed" in California "assembled" in China. There's a lot of Chinese designing to get the assembling part done now. If the only way you can goto market in reasonable timeframe is to have PRC iterate your design by rapidly leveraging their supply chains and human capita, then it's not really Made in USA Phone.
> Kind of a pointless debate point (and economic plan) as it will always come down to humans and market conditions.
Exactly, even the Fairphone is assembled in China.
> ‘Let's take an existing made-in-China product and then just produce the same thing in the US.’
This is what got me. I remember 40-50 years ago everything (or most) "made in the USA". And how "Chinese product" was an insult while "American product" was a badge of honour. Oh how the turnstable..
When I was studying in the UK the _most_ diligent students were the Chinese ones. First to come, last to leave, spent hours and hours on workshops, but they were not interested in staying in the UK to live/work there. As if they were on a mission. Go-Learn-Return-SpreadKnowledge. Many other nationalities were tempted by the mighty-GBP and stayed. But not the Chinese. Vast majority of them learned as much as they could and then went back home. That was mid-90s.
And those 20yo students of the mid-90s are 50yo with great studies and 30 years of experience, and there were thousands of them studying all over the UK, USA, and other countries. So there you have it..
I keep thinking of "Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order by Ray Dalio" [0]. The game is almost over, time for the next cycle..
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xguam0TKMw8
>We sell a Chinese made Librem 5 phone for $799. We sell the Liberty phone for $2,000. When you're looking at just those numbers alone, that looks like a giant leap in cost. But there's a couple of factors that are not publicly known when you're looking at just those prices. When you're looking at COGS, cost of goods sold, our Librem 5 phone is equivalent in cost to about an iPhone. It's about $500 and some odd dollars, $550. So we can see that the Librem 5 phone doesn't have a very high margin when we sell it. The Liberty phone, same COGS componentry wise, but to produce it on US soil, we're adding not quite a hundred dollars. So it's about $650 to produce that entire phone.
So the phone that costs them $550 is sold for about $800, while the phone that costs them $650 is sold for $2000. I wonder why is such a big difference in the margins.
These are interesting numbers and they're oddly buried towards the bottom of the article. A ~20% mark up for mostly sourcing and manufacturing in the US is less than I'd expected, especially given the 250% price difference. He does say something about why that is:
> It's the fact that it's a secure supply chain, that you know, staff that's completely auditing every component, which means we're selling to a government security market with all those additional layers that we've added on top.
So a mix of marketing and supply chain security. Businesses charge the price people will tolerate paying.
Something that caught my attention is how they started with Chinese design and engineering because that was where the knowledge was. They they learned and appropriated that knowledge to the point where this was not needed anymore.
I love this approach, as it’s not purely commercial, it’s focused on knowledge, and it’s not “stealing” tech, they probably have that on their contracts and the like.
Also, it’s EXACTLY what China set out to do a few decades ago, and foreign industrialists and capitalists were so eager to spend less, they flocked over there, and the Chinese now have the knowledge as well as the labor force do to what they do.
Some people love to cry about how China is “stealing” American tech, when in reality no one ever pointed a gun at a tech CEO’s head and said “you must move manufacturing to China.” They did it because it was profitable, and they knew the terms.
I’m not saying industrial espionage doesn’t happen in China, it does, as it does anywhere else. I just don’t like the rhetoric of saying they’re “bad” for doing a perfectly legal business tactic.
Was this written by GPT2? It makes zero sense to me. I've designed and shipped chips on u.s. soil.
It's a transcript of a conversation after the first two paragraphs.
"manufacturing expertise exists primarily in China, Vietnam, Cambodia, and other countries" lol. What's this skill that Cambodians have that Americans can't learn or can't be automated by robots? Can they juggle 4 wrenches in the air simultaneously?
Expertise exists primarily where things primarily happen. If no companies manufacture complicated products in a particular country that doesn't mean the country is too dumb to make it, it means they don't have a large pool of experts in that field.
If you read the article, the founder of purism even says as much.
"After we were successful on the Librem 5 crowdfunding campaign, we took our own electronics engineers (EEs), and then we worked with Chinese design and manufacturing through 2018, 2019, and 2020, because that's where every phone is made."
So the only phone that qualifies for "Made in the USA" tag learned (at least in part) how to make it from Chinese engineer(ing firm)s.
So basically you can find qualified workers everywhere. There's a valid question about the cost. But to say the problem is lacking "skilled workers" is laughable as most of these skills are machine dependent and can only be learned on the job after the factory is built.
Are there skills involved with building such factories and production lines? Where do those people get their experience?
American and multi-national companies often build such factories in low-income countries. It's not that no one in the US knows how to build factories. It's purely a cost/regulation question.
The skills to live on $1-$2/hour apparently.
He's not saying americans couldn't learn to do it. He's saying there aren't many people in the US to hire who already know how to do it.
One particularly bizarre delusion that some people suffer under is to assume that everything they don't know how to do is easy.
It's the same kind of people who would design a city with no toilets or waste water treatment. Everything is easy when you ignore half of the requirements.
I had a Librem 15 and I will never buy another Purism product again.
I wish it was good, but the product broke in less than two years. Worse yet, when it broke Purism couldn't help at all because they stopped making the 15s.
That will be a hard pass for me...
I'm still using my Librem 15 and it works fine though.
Lucky!
The first issue I had was the battery not being replaceable since they stopped making the 15's battery and couldn't offer any OEM/part info for a replacement.
The second issue was more serious, the motherboard simply died and couldn't boot.
At least I was able to recover the drive/ram which went into my new system76 laptop (that was 2.5 years ago).
> Lucky!
There are other lucky people on their forum: https://forums.puri.sm/t/librem-15v4-and-non-free-purism-rep... and https://forums.puri.sm/t/librem-15v4-and-non-free-purism-rep.... There are unlucky ones too, but less it seems: https://forums.puri.sm/t/librem-15-v4-laptop-not-turning-on-...
"[...] chip sets that are like ST Micro [a Swiss company with American factories]"
I guess that if Ford moved their HQ in DRC, it would be called a Congolese company with American factories, too?
I googled St Micro. It's a france company with no factories in the US since 2010 as far as I can tell.
Lol, i hadn't even checked the status (or existence, even) of ST's US factories. I've just known the company for a good amount of years having worked with their products for several projects and thus already knew that the biggest portion of their factories and offices is spread across France and Italy (whence their venture originally started from), so to present it as a Swiss company just underlined a very poor knowledge of the topic IMHO
"On those two products we take the printed circuit board, which is just a blank board that has no components"
Don't count on that. On Schneier's blog years ago, we brainstormed attacks on hardware in subversion discussions. One idea was putting a hidden chip in the board itself. Another was modifying the board's material to emanate secrets for RF attacks by a nearby attacker. There's a reason high-security at NSA required TEMPEST shielding. I wonder who prints the circuit boards.
On the chip side, substituting one of them with the same covers would be an easy attack. One team showed a tiny change at analog level could have subversive effects with low odds of being spotted. I wonder how they verify they received the correct chips.
Just from a domestic, manufacturing angle, the story sounds great. I'm grateful the company made sacrifices to make smartphones in America. I hope their example leads to innovation that drives the prices further down.
"we are doing the entire manufacturing process of all of the electronics, meaning resistors, capacitors, integrated circuits"
I disagree with this take unless the integrated circuits are designed and fabbed in America and by Purism. They're critical, high-value parts of the product that used to be piles of individual components before ASIC's. If not made here, I'd say upfront it's manufactured in USA "except for (percentage or function of) integrated circuits in it."
How much would it cost to create the equivalent of a first generation iPhone 8 with more storage space in America?
That phone had everything necessary for communication, navigation, and even some basic photography and entertainment.
Imagine a whole industry of distraction free dumb phones being built, by economic necessity right here in America, that then result in lower rates of addiction and better mental health.
It's not like you can't doomscroll TikTok on an iPhone 8. I don't think getting slightly lower FPS on 3D games would lower addiction rates.
How is the iPhone 8 anything close to a "dumb phone" ?
my bank doesn’t support iphone 7 anymore so i guess it’s getting closer to a dumbphone, and not doomscrolling my bank account is definitely a plus for my health
And it is only matter of iOS version level which apps cut of at. Apple could "fix" that by providing yet another iOS upgrade for these older devices.
Was just thinking about this the other day. Why were the librem and the pinephone never updated? I'd like to get a new one, but am sure not going to buy something 10+ years old at this point. (Would be happy if a new one was comparable to my old iPhone 6s.)
I know there's not a lot of money in them. But if you want sales at all you better update your hardware more often than never.
Librem 5 is starting to get old, can't argue with that, but it's not quite 10+ years old yet. It's a 2018-2019 design based on a SoC that went into GA in 2018. Even though its ARM cores weren't state-of-the-art at that time already, it has bigger caches, stronger GPU and faster DDR that what you would usually find paired with similar cores earlier, giving it a solid boost when compared to, say, PinePhone, which uses a CPU that seems very similar from a quick glance at specs on paper until you actually try to use it.
I've been using L5 as my daily driver for years now and I don't feel very constrained with its performance just yet. The most painful things are related to lack of features in its SoC rather than its age - such as no hw video encoding or camera ISP, which means that things that other phones do efficiently in hardware have to be done in software. i.MX 8M Quad isn't the best suited SoC for mobile phone use-case, but it was the best that was available back then given other constraints of the project.
Today there's still no abundance of such choices, but there actually are a few more interesting ones on the market. I hope we'll see some projects following through soonish, as I'll eventually need an upgrade path for my Librem 5 indeed.
Maybe not in years, but my iPhone 6s debuted in 2015 and Android of the time was competitive. These phones don't match it. It's not so much bad performance I object to but spending top dollar on something that's already long obsolete. Qualcom is supposed to have competitive CPUs now.
An business should be able to buy cheap Android phones in bulk, install Linux, charge an extra $100/yr for drivers and support, and start a nice little business. Believe Purism already has a subscription where they provide vpn, matrix, and other privacy tools, so they are almost there.
Maybe they need an investor, but honestly the capital outlay should be tiny for the amount of goodwill and eventually business it would bring. With the trillions sloshing around with nowhere to go at the moment, it could change the world for the better.
> An business should be able to buy cheap Android phones in bulk, install Linux
Good luck with that. Unless you settle for Android middleware underneath your OS (like some existing projects do), it's a massive undertaking. You still need to invest a lot into R&D while you lose what's differentiating you in the process (in case of Librem 5, there are things like hardware kill switches, PGP card reader, replaceable M.2 modules etc.) so you can chase SoCs that will already be considered obsolete once you're done with the software anyway. Even Purism with their prices couldn't afford to use an unsupported SoC and relied on NXP's upstreaming efforts.
I suspect that if I was wrong and it was actually a viable path it would already be taken by someone. Maybe we'll see something appearing in coming years, as these days more vendors actually started to care about mainline support, but as it is today the landscape is still not that great, especially when it comes to SoCs that are actually targeting smartphones.
Lots of companies build/buy/sell cheap phones and presumably put some work into getting Android up on the hardware.
I think maybe that's where Purism went wrong. They tried to go pure from the get-go. But think it would be better to get a profitable product out first, and then invest in opening components, one by one.
I don't need a perfect device. Rather hardware getting better every year. Then I could upgrade, and they'd make more money.
Getting Android up on the hardware is easy - you just grab the unmaintainable kernel fork provided by the vendor and you're 90% there.
I'm not interested in Android though, so I just wouldn't buy such phone no matter how cheap would it be. I'm not interested in upgrading every year either. Librem 5 is great, but unfortunately I'll need something to upgrade to in a few years anyway, as the Web has a tendency to only get heavier with time.
You don't have to upgrade every year, the point is that the hardware improves over time.
And that's what I'd love to see. It's not as easy as you make it appear though. An obvious upgrade path for Librem 5 would be a newer SoC from i.MX line as there have been several released since, but all of them are even less suited for a smartphone than i.MX 8M or come with downgrades in some important areas, such as GPU - so this now calls for a complete redesign around a different vendor. Not impossible, but not cheap either.
Grabbing some cheap Android devices is a path to nowhere. Otherwise we all could be just grabbing them and putting postmarketOS on them ourselves, as there's no shortage of such devices on the market.
A defeatist mindset. The point is to make money, then invest in making more.
For example my new starlite linux tablet is awesome and star is making money hand over fist. Because they finally built a good one and stopped making excuses. They develop firmware with coreboot and upstream patches to Linux.
That’s what a successful business is, you invest then reap the rewards.
Then what are you waiting for? There's a successful business for you to pursue and reap the rewards from.
I've been using GNU/Linux phones and watching this market for the last 18 years. If I'm a defeatist, please prove me wrong.
I'm broke but would gladly join an effort.
What exactly do you want to upgrade? See also: https://puri.sm/posts/the-danger-of-focusing-on-specs/
Pine64 updated the PinePhone with the PinePhone Pro.
It was more like making the PinePhone catch up to Librem 5. I'm writing this on my L5 and I still have no prospects if I wanted to upgrade.
Guess I thought of that one as more like a "fix," since the first one was not fit for purpose. Still not good enough, needs spec bump and driver support.
I was looking at potential linux phones the other day, postmarketOS has ports for phones as new as fairphone 4 and OnePlus 6. They don't have any phones with decent camera support though.
https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Devices
Hmm, I saw the fairphone 5 on another page and the hardware support is not substantially worse.
Install page says you need fairphone.com to give you permission to unlock. :-/
yeah most android phones do, it has to do with the modem I think
>driver support
It's Pine64, their whole business model is «Here's the hardware, you're on your own now».
Not a good business model if they can’t afford to rev the hardware.
$2000 is a punchline to a joke? No?? OK then, we're back at the 1990s cost level, when cell phones were as big as a brick with 50% of it being a battery.
https://www.ooma.com/wp-content/uploads/cell-phone-cost-comp...
It's more like 2017 era technology done at a very small scale with massive markup (I think they mention it costs them like $650 to produce). They don't have the scale needed to access the latest chips.
It's kind of amazing the markup and also their listed BOM costs when if a no-name Chinese company made a phone with this level of specs and put it on Amazon it would be like $100.
I wonder why won't they do this then. There's still no comparable GNU/Linux phone on the market to this day, so this would be a huge opportunity if true. The only exception may be PinePhone Pro, but it isn't much cheaper than Librem 5 and its software maturity is still lacking.
Quadcore ARM Cortex-A53 is 2014 era technology.
Low volume, mostly sold to govt types.
ctrl+f "moat"
Hmm. So why can they have a 3x markup?
What is the moat? Who will overpay by $1,000?
1. People who are required to use a product with very specific certifications.
2. People who want to use a product with a desirable backstory.
In the first instance the US military requires testing and certifications that are costly to achieve, creating a moat for military suppliers.
In the second instance, some podcast listeners are willing to significantly overpay for generic supplements due to the backstory and their trust in that podcaster.
I am curious what the market breakdown is for this device - how many do they sell for case 1? how many do they sell for case 2?
Also, if they don't sell very many, then their manufacturing capital costs, design and supply chain overheads per phone will be very high.
>We can't have some nefarious chip put into the supply chain from a hostile country.
On the other hand, China can think the same. Why rely on Qualcomm, Intel, Nvidia? Or why rely on any US based tech, including software and services?
This is kind of like the PCB pricing story, they could be priced competitively but that's not how the market in the US for domestic PCB manufacturing has been setup. It's been setup to target things that must be made here, where pricing is usually dictated by that demand rather than a competitive market rate.
If china were taken out of the picture (e.g. JLCPCB) ideally a competitor would attempt to take what was that market. Or not? Maybe the margins are low and this is why it hasn't happened here already.
On iOS, if you go into Settings -> General -> Legal & Regulatory , and scroll all the way down to the very bottom, you will see: "Made in China" :)
This article isn't about the iPhone
hahah, I noticed that this morning! too late now :'D
> It's going from raw materials to finished goods at our facility.
More lies from Mr. Weaver... I'm sorry but an imx5 SoC is not a raw material.
I don’t understand
I get that you can assemble a phone PCB with SMT parts yourself, that’s not that crazy
But is there actually an American made SoC that can be used for a phone?
They use i.mx8 by NXP. But that is not a mobile phone SoC. NXP has Fabs in USA where these can be made.
On purism the actual mobile phone part is on a separate modem board. The Modem is Made in China, using Qualcomm chip made in Taiwan. I presume QC could make some of their SOCs in TSMC American plants if someone makes a big enough order.
Cost is 650 and they sell it for 2k? lol
By the time the US learns what "efficiency" means, China will be building on Mars
Taiwan used to be just fishing villages, the idea that it could become a powerhouse chip manufacturer was just pure fantasy.
It took several decades of consistent development. It is not possible to do that, in US with 4 year election cycle. Next gov will just roll back all reforms, and redirects all money...
Case in point: https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2025/03/04/trump-joint...
But ultimately, this is why America should look towards congress for enacting lasting change.
exactly is not like a president can override congress powers and be able to dismantle agencies or set tariffs for example. everyone will trust the stability of the policies then.
I think its more of a lack of commitment from congress to stop it. They have tools available, they haven't really used them.
> It is not possible to do that, in US with 4 year election cycle.
Taiwan also seems to have a 4 year election cycle. It may be something about a culture that cannot think long term any more ...
Also, it would require democrats and republicans working together for the common good, which is not a thing anymore.
What is the takeaway of your comment? That no president should undertake projects requiring more than 4 years?
Presidents can work with Congress to pass laws that last more than 4 years. We used to do that kind of thing around here but now that it's all just a big game open only to the outrageously wealthy, tit for tat and I got mine are the norm. There is no path for progress in that system. We must return to the old way of doing things where the executive and the legislature work together on the critical items that cannot be solved for in 4 or 8 years.
Given the current direction and pace it's the only sane conclusion, we went from fragile stability to complete chaos in a few decades
What stability "a few decades" ago? Are you referring to the Cold War when we thought the US and USSR might end the world in nuclear war?
What chaos? The market going down a little bit?
I in no way think you are responding in good faith, but the relevant bit to this discussion is the very public killing of the CHIPS Act: https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2025/03/04/trump-joint...
He is responding in good faith. You lack historic perspective.
CHIPS act is still in place
https://www.techtarget.com/searchcio/news/366622293/Trump-pu...
If that is repealed, it would be replaced by something with more favorable terms for the US.
TSMC is investing $65B to build three fabs in Arizona.
Isn't it primarily in place because the money was already spent? And someone had to later tell our 'leader' that what he said was nonsense?
Yes, and?
Are you against negotiating a better deal?
You know that time of stability a few decades ago when tens of millions of Chinese were starving to death and being massacred in the Cultural Revolution.
Imagine if Trump pulled young men's name from a lottery and forced them to go shoot people on the other side of the Earth in defense of "capitalism".
That is literally what my father and his friends dealt with as young men after dealing with the Cuban Missile Crisis as children.
I only dealt with this one time in 1st grade. Air raid drill, get under the desk kids and cover your head to practice in the event the Russians drop a megaton h-bomb on the school.
Or the stability of WW1 or WW2?
1990 to 2020 was a wonderful time, I feel so lucky to have lived my life then but that was a completely abnormally calm time in history.
Yes the 20th century was insane.
But we had the GFC in 2008. Millions of people lost their homes, lost their job, lost their savings.
1990's were pretty stable.
More like no president can undertake projects requiring more than 4, or at best 8, years.
> It took several decades of consistent development.
Well... and massive investments. Where did those come from?
> It is not possible to do that, in US with 4 year election cycle
The great thing about Trump is he has made everyone forget that Congress exists and has these responsibilities.
> Next gov will just roll back all reforms, and redirects all money...
The other great thing is people forget Trump has donors and investors on his side who benefit from all these changes. The next administration will be just as beholden to these interests as this one is. The current US president is just a branded token of the elites. It's meant to keep the population in check not create a policy free for all.
Congress has made everyone forget that Congress exists by delegating enormous amounts of their power to the executive. They could reassert their power over tariffs at any time, but they won't.
Taiwan is a democracy with 4 year elections. When Taiwan operated in one party rule under the Chiang family they did not make significant economic progress.
> When Taiwan operated in one party rule under the Chiang family they did not make significant economic progress
This is objectively wrong.
Taiwan made tremendous economic progress during the period of one-party rule under Chiang Kai-shek and later his son Chiang Ching-kuo. During the KMT's authoritarian rule from the late 1940s through the 1980s, Taiwan experienced the "Taiwan Miracle". Land reforms in the 1950s boosted agricultural productivity and created a rural middle class. In the 1960s Taiwan shifted from an agriculture-based economy to an export-oriented industrial economy, and by the 1980s Taiwan had one of the fastest-growing economies in the world, with GDP growth rates often exceeding 8-10% annually. Chiang pursued an export-led growth model, encouraging foreign investment and industrial development, supporting industries like semiconductors, which is why you have TSMC today.
The KMT government also made major investments in education, particularly in science and engineering, hugely increasing literacy rates. All these strategic initiatives and policies meant that Taiwan became one of the Four Asian Tigers by the 1980s.
On a slightly related note, on Taiwanese social media today it is not uncommon to come across Taiwanese people lamenting that the KMT built the TSMC, and the DPP is selling it out. Whether this is a fair and accurate assessment of the DPP is another discussion, but this seems to be the sentiment among many Taiwanese these days.
Credit where credit is due, you're right. I'll admit, I was very unimpressed with the Chiang family's rule in general and ascribed the success of Taiwan to them not being charge, which was not correct. Quoting from the end of the wikipedia background article on the Taiwan Miracle:
> After retreating to Taiwan, Chiang learned from his mistakes and failures in the mainland and blamed them for failing to pursue Sun Yat-sen's ideals of Tridemism and welfarism. Chiang's land reform more than doubled the land ownership of Taiwanese farmers. It removed the rent burdens on them, with former land owners using the government compensation to become the new capitalist class. He promoted a mixed economy of state and private ownership with economic planning. Chiang also promoted a 9-years compulsory education and the importance of science in Taiwanese education and values. These measures generated great success with consistent and strong growth and the stabilization of inflation.
"Next Administration" LOL
if you believe that, i have a bridge to sell you. the us government has a very definite consistent policy trajectory. only culture war issues sort of sometimes wobble. usually republicans shake things up and democrats cement in the changes.
Integrated circuits were invented in Silicon Valley, California.
Intel has factories in the US.
"Trump and TSMC announce $100 billion plan to build five new US factories"
https://www.reuters.com/technology/tsmc-ceo-meet-with-trump-...
Democrats and Republicans are united on this. They all want semiconductors manufactured domestically.
People underestimate the importance of individuals sometimes, like Morris Chang, without whom Taiwan would probably be more comparable to SK or Vietnam.
So was Shenzhen.
If you're ever in Shenzhen, I recommend going to the Shenzhen Museum. It's pretty amazing to see how quickly it grew (~40 years), and the level of stuff that they were making early on vs now.
Another big take away for me was that they highlighted who had been the chief customs officer over time. Controlling the flow of goods in and out is matter of pride for Shenzhen and China.
A big company like Apple can literally just buy the expertise that is needed to move production anywhere that makes sense.
Flex likewise can do the same.
There will be some ramp up time but these companies operate as scale.
I wonder how much it costs to do the following -- let's backtrack.
We already know that US companies can design phones, like Apple.
OK so the next step is to figure out where to source the components -- and under the context of OP's article, that means which components can be sourced directly from the US, or from the EU (i.e. manufactured inside EU, not branded in EU but sourced elsewhere).
Once we can figure out which components are economically feasible to be manufactured in the US and EU with the tariff, we might be able to go from there and slowly expand the operation to the rest of the chain.
Companies will never pay an American worker what an American worker needs to survive or live. This is going nowhere because unlike China where street food is had for pennies, American street food is BK, McD's and Taco Bell for $$$. Cost of living? Americans want homes, they don't want to live with their families, they want cars not bikes. Manufacturing in America will take a century. IMO
That was an incredibly long interview for them to just say the COGS is only 100$ higher, but we feel the margin should be 1200.
There's margin (on BOM cost), and then there's profit margin (above the design cost).
Design costs are probably an order of magnitude higher in USA than in China, and can't be spread over hundreds of thousands of units. I'd bet the profit isn't that great.
Many of these articles make a great case for why these industries should have been protected domestically years ago.
Made in the USA makes no business sense for everything
Then again our POTUS is a self proclaimed genius
Purism also markups their mini PC by a lot. Bunch of scammers IMO. Source: https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/New-Top-mini-pc-i7-10...
You can't just say this without providing a source.
Sure, https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/New-Top-mini-pc-i7-10... is the minipc they use. Just buy it directly from China and install Coreboot.
> Just buy it directly from China and install Coreboot.
"Just" is doing a lot of work here, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43638323
There's YouTube tutorials and folks that will help out. It's the price you pay when you save money.
So many people prefer to pay to avoid these troubles, which is fine. It's just not for you.
"You could count the number of skilled electronics engineers on US soil, and there's probably a million in Shenzhen alone."
Anyone else failing to semantically parse that sentence?
My read for that was "a human could, reasonably, count one-by-one the number of engineers if they were all arrayed in front of them", while a human can't reasonable count "one, two, three" and get to a million.
I would say that a number humans can reasonably count to is about ~15,000, maybe 25k, assuming you're limited to about 15 hours of counting. Any number over about 100k is simply a number humans are incapable of counting up to from one.
Maybe they forgot the word "more"? It makes sense to me:
"You could count the number of skilled electronics engineers on US soil, and [whatever that number may be] there's probably a million MORE in Shenzhen alone."
Yeah, it's poorly worded, but this guy is clearly talking in management-speak and not normal English anyway.
Same here. I was trying to insert “on one hand” or similar before the comma, but that’s too small.
I suspect the quotation was due to that inside their own head — that they were actually going to say "on one hand" but stopped themselves because it wasn't correct.
Maybe he just means they're literally countable. Like, accurate to a single digit?
It may mean that the set of the skilled electronics engineers on US soil is countable, so it is finite or there could be a one to one correspondence with the set of natural numbers.
Oh man Purism, well I think Librem but yeah
America need more manufacturing and less service industry.
A year ago I would've been ready and willing to pay double price for a fully US-made phone. Purism's liberty phone seemed interesting.
Now, I will not buy american products at any price. It feels totally ridiculous now to even talk about moving the supply chain to the US.
> A year ago I would've been ready and willing to pay double price for a fully US-made phone.
Why? What justified double the price a year ago? Especially since you sound like you're not an USer...
Ok maybe avoiding China would have been a good idea 1 year ago too. But from that to overpaying for something just because it's made in the most expensive country in the world...
Good question, I honestly don't know anymore. Some manifestation of soft power that vanished into the air?
China is still no better and this phone runs FLOSS. It's still the best offer for the hackers and activists.