14 ms·

I know this is so different, but I can't help but think of the 1950's DoD Heavy Press Program[0]. I think about these special industrial monsters a lot when I r

I know this is so different, but I can't help but think of the 1950's DoD Heavy Press Program[0]. I think about these special industrial monsters a lot when I read about semi fabs. In WW2 after examining the components from aircraft kills, german wing spars would often survive. It was discovered that Germany used unique forged alloy wing spars to achieve their excellent aircraft performance, perplexing allied engineers. These wing spars' strength and weight is critical to the structural properties of modern air frames. Without them, jet air craft like the f-15 would have been impossible. Machining these advanced alloy parts proved difficult, expensive, error prone, and impossible to manufacture but a die forged alloy wing spar was stronger, lighter, cheaper and beyond the industrial capability of every allied nation. We did not have the metallurgical technology to create such a large forged alloy wing spar in 1945. After the war, the US and Soviets recovered designs for the extremely large press assemblies required for advanced air frames. In the 1950s, a huge national program was geared up to create absolutely massive Heavy Press machines. The Soviets had a massive 30,000lb press for these parts, and we created a couple of monstrous 50,000lb machines[1] that are still in operation today. These things are older than we are and still out there cranking out air frame parts today for modern air frames in 2021. Without this kind of national investment in this kind of unique manufacturing, we would be unable to fly without importing 747 parts from wherever they could be created. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_Press_Program https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_Press_Program [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZ50nZU3oG8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZ50nZU3oG8

aww_dang 5y ago
These presses were necessitated in Germany by a shortage of materials, abundant magnesium and limitations of the Treaty of Versailles https://www.forgemag.com/articles/84706-invisible-strength-forgings-hidden-value-in-military-aircraft https://www.forgemag.com/articles/84706-invisible-strength-f... The conclusion about the inability of the market to develop alternative or similar manufacturing techniques isn't established by observing that the state did.
- cartoonworld 5y ago
  There was a shortage of materials and manpower in late Germany, that is another benefit of the forge and extrusion process. The alternative to forging the wing spars is to create a sub assembly from a dozen or more smaller components. The fasteners, drilling, and overlapping joints create a mechanically weaker, larger, and heavier assembly with worse material properties than a one-piece forged part. In addition, assembling a wing spar from a dozen parts creates wasted materials from additional steps in the process (machining, forging, drilling, riveting a dozen parts) which takes much more time, requires skilled technicians, and decreases tolerances in the resulting assembly. Machining titanium has different and worse metallurgical properties than a single forged part. You can heat treat the forged titanium part which has totally uniform mechanical properties, where in an assembly each part might have different inclusions and defects that are much harder to control for in process. This aids QC as well, as you can just X-ray the forged titanium part once. So yes, they did, but its much more than that. The forged wing spars improve dozens of manufacturing, QC and engineering problems in addition to the material savings. Even without that, the forged parts are still a prerequisite for modern air frames. EDIT: sorry, I didn't notice your edit. It may be that the market would provide these Heavy Press machines, and I mean the DoD partnered with ALCOA and other existing experts to build and run the presses, and the private market owned and profited from them, but in 1945 there wasn't a market for this except to the Air Force. That's why the DoD funded it. I'm sure the market could have also invested the absurd dollar sums, I mean the things are still used today, what was the total ROI on the Iron Giant presses... its incalculable. But I'm almost certain today's globalized manufacturing would do what they are doing now: Make them in Taiwan, China, developing nations, and ship them across the ocean. The point is that the Air Force recognized the value of making the wing spars in country, so you can't bomb, flood, or capture the presses. We should definitely be able to crank out i7's on our continent, I don't care how.
  - aww_dang 5y ago
    >We should definitely be able to crank out i7's on our continent Agreed. I'd add that the export of dollars is related to central bank policy.
specialist 5y ago
Terrific analogy, thanks. I support most any kind of national policy. Industrial, agricultural, transportation, education, etc. Sure, use markets, incentives, competition. Use some combo: - private & public orgs - private & public capital & finance - top down & bottom up organizations, ranging from risk minimizing to hail mary. Basically, whatever basket of strategies works. But mostly I simply support directed, sustained investment in ourselves and our future.
- wolverine876 5y ago
  > But mostly I simply support directed, sustained investment in ourselves and our future. But who chooses the investment? While I'm not anti-tax, I generally think the aggregated intelligence of the free market makes the best decisions, in most cases.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - specialist 5y ago
    Try everything. Why not? Just like science, progress requires a lot of failures. Throwing good money after bad makes me grumpy. So we need feedback loops, post mortems, etc. Currently, every bit of legislation requires a fiscal note. Expected costs, projected impact, ROI, etc. We'd all benefit if society worked harder to do the obvious followup steps.
    - wolverine876 5y ago
      > Try everything. Why not? Because it consumes resources that are needed elsewhere, such as for healthcare, education, etc. Because it centralizes power in politicians and in large corporations. Because it's not freedom. > we need feedback loops, post mortems, etc. Agreed, but let's not expect people to suddenly start doing those things.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
lumost 5y ago
There is an interesting corollary here. Given a narrow market and the high capex of such industrial machinery, it doesn't make sense for anyone to build a second machine. The owner of the machine can effectively charge all customers the marginal cost to build a new machine in perpetuity as a natural monopoly. Odds are Semi is heading in the same direction where it doesn't make sense to build new fabs except for national security reasons, and whoever controls the massive fab can charge the marginal cost of building a new one to each of their customers indefinitely.
- darig 5y ago
  Why couldn't the owner of the machine simply be suicided?
- shkkmo 5y ago
  > it doesn't make sense for anyone to build a second machine. Maybe it doesn't make sense for private parties, since it clearly makes sense for nations to not rely of adversaries for their supply chains. I would also argue that it your ability to rely on a competitor that is critical to your supply chain depends on which laws that prevent anti-competive practices are present in the relevant jurisdictions.
- tomp 5y ago
  This doesn't make rational sense. Investments aren't financed by customers, they're financed by investors. I reckon in today's money-printing world it's easy to get even $1bn if you can credibly say to the investors that you can charge each customer 90% of the full investment (hell, even for 10% it's still a great business!)
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - lumost 5y ago
    In certain cases the requisite machine required can inherently run at a capacity larger than the market would ever require. In the case of new competition the response of the monopoly holder would be to simply discount prices by X% for N years until the new entrant goes bankrupt. In the case of presses, as the Capex was paid ~70 years ago by the incumbent they have an intrinsic financial advantage against an upstart. It's a bad deal for investors to race to the bottom with an existing market player in a commodity business. It only makes financial sense for customers who dislike the marginal rate or feel there is a security need requiring their own supply chain. The only way to break out of this would be a technical invention which allowed lower capacity production or technical innovation obviating the need for the monopoly. In the case of an industrial press this is a less likely outcome due to the physics of the machine and the intended application.
ArkanExplorer 5y ago
Heavy industry and chip manufacturing are not really comparable though. The cutting edge nodes are only relevant for a few years, maybe a decade for rudimentary components. The major problem the US, and the West, face right now is that its more profitable to speculate on financial and real estate assets than it is to actually produce anything. In 20201 in Sydney and Vancouver for example, the average house price has increased more per day than the average daily salary for a worker... The other issue is that the West (particularly the Anglosphere) is intent on importing as many low-cost workers as possible, from countries with poor records of innovation, who then bring their own problems such as caste favoritism and high in-group preferences. The simplest solution would probably be to import Taiwanese engineers en-masse, and formally create new chipset companies (which are not Intel), which it seems only China is really doing. A direct policy approach could be for the USA to offer anyone with a university degree or trade skill and under the age of 40, from non-oil countries with a HDI of over .85 the ability to permanently migrate to the USA for a nominal fee: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Human_Development_Index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Human_Dev... And at the same time, deporting all illegal immigrants (to free up housing) and building walls along the southern border - the shortage of cheap labour will encourage automation and innovation.
- jiofih 5y ago
  Damn, it started well but you went into some really deep prejudice. I’ll take note that Taiwanese are the best ROI for low cost immigrants - apparently much better than Mexicans. How about putting some reins on the real estate and trading markets instead of “getting better immigrants”? Sounds a little bit more logical.
  - l33t2328 5y ago
    > but you went into some really deep prejudice Can you elaborate what deep prejudice you got from that comment?
    - CameronNemo 5y ago
      Building a wall to keep the Mexicans out. Seems pretty fucked up from my POV, somebody who has lived in SoCal for nearly 25 years.
fpoling 5y ago
Soviet Union tried that with semiconductor industry in 1970s and 1980s. They managed to clone 8086 CPU but failed with 286 even after Soviet intelligence had stolen detailed blueprints for Intel manufacturing processes. Similarly Russia failed to create anything close to F22 engines. What is important is manufacturing culture. Without that one can clone a factory, but it will not help with the next generational process. And it is known how to build such culture in relatively short time frame, culture. Just look at Japan, South Korea or Taiwan.
- jollybean 5y ago
  Good point, but 'manufacturing culture' is also dependent on the prevailing 'regular culture' and also 'conditions'. Japan, SK and Taiwan are the kinds of places where you could convince a lot of people to 'do this and that for the good of the country' - especially since they were flat on their backs and rebuilding from nothing, at the same time facing existential external powers. 'Post-War' was a quasi-authoritarian national strategy almost as much as the actual war or preparation for it was. In North America especially, we live in a 'Safe Bubble' we don't really have the sense of existential angst that a place like Korea might have, what with a direct record of thousands of years of war and tumult from any number of neighbours which still exist today. Even in W. Europe the living memory of that stuff seems rather fargone.
- SkyMarshal 5y ago
  >And it is known how to build such culture in relatively short time frame, culture. Just look at Japan, South Korea or Taiwan. Indeed. To expand on that, there is an economist Richard Werner [1] who has studied that process in depth. The TLDR is that new money/credit creation needs to be allocated primarily toward production and innovation, vs consumption or asset speculation (the three things money can be allocated toward). In post-WWII Japan this process was called "Window Guidance" [2], an informal system by which the BoJ directed the banking system to fund industrial development. The Asian Tigers and then China all copied the model in their development program too, so it's clearly portable, but interestingly remains informal. You would think an effective model like this would be formalized into law at some point. [1]:https://professorwerner.org/; https://professorwerner.org/; https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Richard-Werner https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Richard-Werner [2]:http://princesoftheyen.com/central-bank-money-creation/ http://princesoftheyen.com/central-bank-money-creation/ (scroll down to Window Guidance section).
Qub3d 5y ago
Here's a great video essay on the program: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpgK51w6uhk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpgK51w6uhk
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
jiofih 5y ago
For reference, 50000lbs is 22 tons. Tesla is now using 6000 and 8000 ton casting machines to build the Model Y and Cybertruck chassis. And they come from Europe again!
- mcabbott 5y ago
  The big Alcoa press is 50_000 tons, not lbs. There are slightly larger ones now, 60, 75ktons. (22 tons is, of course, force that any rail yard could produce a century ago.)
- durge 5y ago
  I think that is a mistyping - the Alcoa presses are 50,000 tons, not lbs.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- cartoonworld 5y ago
  Indeed I made a couple of typos. But this is a great opportunity to observe some of the engineering challenges with these advanced manufacturing techniques. Tesla Model S and X were constructed with alloy control arms (Tesla calls them 'fore links') which sometimes did not meet specifications, resulting in catastrophic failures[0] termed "Wompy Wheel" in the press. I don't know if they are extruded or forged, I think they are extrusions but I haven't had a really close look. One thing that I've noticed about the failures is that the control arms have what appear to me to be unusually large rubber bushings. I don't know what conclusions can be drawn from that observation, but there it is. I would speculate that the largeish bushings provide improved ride quality. On another note, Tesla wheels were kind of weirdly large, with uncommon tire specs. I've had the opportunity to examine some more resent Tesla suspension components and they appear quite resilient. However, YMMV, I am not an X-Ray. [0] https://www.motorbiscuit.com/this-is-bad-whompy-wheel-syndrom-causing-teslas-to-crash/ https://www.motorbiscuit.com/this-is-bad-whompy-wheel-syndro...
laurent92 5y ago
Sure, but which technology should USA reproduce. Just chips, and then be late on everything else? No. There is a gigantic machine in China, its name is Shenzen. Its magic is that you can find any part and people who can rebuild them differently. This is the entire “valley” that USA should bring back home. USA should bring back the construction of the Macbooks, phones, servers and routers, and the entire ecosystem of tinkering that comes with it. This is the backbone of USA’s national security. We just have to acknowledge that having local industries means having poverty and dirty waste disposal at home instead of 9000km away. Which is not necessarily a bad thing either, so we can innovate on efforts.
- azernik 5y ago
  > Sure, but which technology should USA reproduce. Just chips, and then be late on everything else? Whichever ones are essential to national security. The ability to manufacture local, trusted hardware is important for military purposes, just like the ability to manufacture high-performance aircraft parts was and is important in the case that overseas suppliers are hostile or cut off.
  - iancmceachern 5y ago
    The DMEA in Sacramento basically does this. https://federallabs.org/labs/defense-microelectronics-activity-dmea https://federallabs.org/labs/defense-microelectronics-activi...
- petra 5y ago
  There's a lot of talk about the tinkering culture of Shenzen, but is it really related to innovation? Has Shenzen become a startup hub? What large startups have come out of it?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - frisco 5y ago
    Tencent, Bytedance, Huawei, DJI, SenseTime, ZTE? At least back in ~2015 when I visited, it was definitely a major startup hub.
AngryData 5y ago
Quick correction, those are 50,000 ton presses, not lbs.
- cartoonworld 5y ago
  Yes, thank you. I made an error, thanks for the correction. Hopefully people watch the DoD film linked in op :)

aww_dang 5y ago

These presses were necessitated in Germany by a shortage of materials, abundant magnesium and limitations of the Treaty of Versailles https://www.forgemag.com/articles/84706-invisible-strength-forgings-hidden-value-in-military-aircraft https://www.forgemag.com/articles/84706-invisible-strength-f... The conclusion about the inability of the market to develop alternative or similar manufacturing techniques isn't established by observing that the state did.

cartoonworld 5y ago
There was a shortage of materials and manpower in late Germany, that is another benefit of the forge and extrusion process. The alternative to forging the wing spars is to create a sub assembly from a dozen or more smaller components. The fasteners, drilling, and overlapping joints create a mechanically weaker, larger, and heavier assembly with worse material properties than a one-piece forged part. In addition, assembling a wing spar from a dozen parts creates wasted materials from additional steps in the process (machining, forging, drilling, riveting a dozen parts) which takes much more time, requires skilled technicians, and decreases tolerances in the resulting assembly. Machining titanium has different and worse metallurgical properties than a single forged part. You can heat treat the forged titanium part which has totally uniform mechanical properties, where in an assembly each part might have different inclusions and defects that are much harder to control for in process. This aids QC as well, as you can just X-ray the forged titanium part once. So yes, they did, but its much more than that. The forged wing spars improve dozens of manufacturing, QC and engineering problems in addition to the material savings. Even without that, the forged parts are still a prerequisite for modern air frames. EDIT: sorry, I didn't notice your edit. It may be that the market would provide these Heavy Press machines, and I mean the DoD partnered with ALCOA and other existing experts to build and run the presses, and the private market owned and profited from them, but in 1945 there wasn't a market for this except to the Air Force. That's why the DoD funded it. I'm sure the market could have also invested the absurd dollar sums, I mean the things are still used today, what was the total ROI on the Iron Giant presses... its incalculable. But I'm almost certain today's globalized manufacturing would do what they are doing now: Make them in Taiwan, China, developing nations, and ship them across the ocean. The point is that the Air Force recognized the value of making the wing spars in country, so you can't bomb, flood, or capture the presses. We should definitely be able to crank out i7's on our continent, I don't care how.
- aww_dang 5y ago
  >We should definitely be able to crank out i7's on our continent Agreed. I'd add that the export of dollars is related to central bank policy.

specialist 5y ago

Terrific analogy, thanks. I support most any kind of national policy. Industrial, agricultural, transportation, education, etc. Sure, use markets, incentives, competition. Use some combo: - private & public orgs - private & public capital & finance - top down & bottom up organizations, ranging from risk minimizing to hail mary. Basically, whatever basket of strategies works. But mostly I simply support directed, sustained investment in ourselves and our future.

wolverine876 5y ago
> But mostly I simply support directed, sustained investment in ourselves and our future. But who chooses the investment? While I'm not anti-tax, I generally think the aggregated intelligence of the free market makes the best decisions, in most cases.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- specialist 5y ago
  Try everything. Why not? Just like science, progress requires a lot of failures. Throwing good money after bad makes me grumpy. So we need feedback loops, post mortems, etc. Currently, every bit of legislation requires a fiscal note. Expected costs, projected impact, ROI, etc. We'd all benefit if society worked harder to do the obvious followup steps.
  - wolverine876 5y ago
    > Try everything. Why not? Because it consumes resources that are needed elsewhere, such as for healthcare, education, etc. Because it centralizes power in politicians and in large corporations. Because it's not freedom. > we need feedback loops, post mortems, etc. Agreed, but let's not expect people to suddenly start doing those things.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

lumost 5y ago

There is an interesting corollary here. Given a narrow market and the high capex of such industrial machinery, it doesn't make sense for anyone to build a second machine. The owner of the machine can effectively charge all customers the marginal cost to build a new machine in perpetuity as a natural monopoly. Odds are Semi is heading in the same direction where it doesn't make sense to build new fabs except for national security reasons, and whoever controls the massive fab can charge the marginal cost of building a new one to each of their customers indefinitely.

darig 5y ago
Why couldn't the owner of the machine simply be suicided?
shkkmo 5y ago
> it doesn't make sense for anyone to build a second machine. Maybe it doesn't make sense for private parties, since it clearly makes sense for nations to not rely of adversaries for their supply chains. I would also argue that it your ability to rely on a competitor that is critical to your supply chain depends on which laws that prevent anti-competive practices are present in the relevant jurisdictions.
tomp 5y ago
This doesn't make rational sense. Investments aren't financed by customers, they're financed by investors. I reckon in today's money-printing world it's easy to get even $1bn if you can credibly say to the investors that you can charge each customer 90% of the full investment (hell, even for 10% it's still a great business!)
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- lumost 5y ago
  In certain cases the requisite machine required can inherently run at a capacity larger than the market would ever require. In the case of new competition the response of the monopoly holder would be to simply discount prices by X% for N years until the new entrant goes bankrupt. In the case of presses, as the Capex was paid ~70 years ago by the incumbent they have an intrinsic financial advantage against an upstart. It's a bad deal for investors to race to the bottom with an existing market player in a commodity business. It only makes financial sense for customers who dislike the marginal rate or feel there is a security need requiring their own supply chain. The only way to break out of this would be a technical invention which allowed lower capacity production or technical innovation obviating the need for the monopoly. In the case of an industrial press this is a less likely outcome due to the physics of the machine and the intended application.

ArkanExplorer 5y ago

Heavy industry and chip manufacturing are not really comparable though. The cutting edge nodes are only relevant for a few years, maybe a decade for rudimentary components. The major problem the US, and the West, face right now is that its more profitable to speculate on financial and real estate assets than it is to actually produce anything. In 20201 in Sydney and Vancouver for example, the average house price has increased more per day than the average daily salary for a worker... The other issue is that the West (particularly the Anglosphere) is intent on importing as many low-cost workers as possible, from countries with poor records of innovation, who then bring their own problems such as caste favoritism and high in-group preferences. The simplest solution would probably be to import Taiwanese engineers en-masse, and formally create new chipset companies (which are not Intel), which it seems only China is really doing. A direct policy approach could be for the USA to offer anyone with a university degree or trade skill and under the age of 40, from non-oil countries with a HDI of over .85 the ability to permanently migrate to the USA for a nominal fee: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Human_Development_Index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Human_Dev... And at the same time, deporting all illegal immigrants (to free up housing) and building walls along the southern border - the shortage of cheap labour will encourage automation and innovation.

jiofih 5y ago
Damn, it started well but you went into some really deep prejudice. I’ll take note that Taiwanese are the best ROI for low cost immigrants - apparently much better than Mexicans. How about putting some reins on the real estate and trading markets instead of “getting better immigrants”? Sounds a little bit more logical.
- l33t2328 5y ago
  > but you went into some really deep prejudice Can you elaborate what deep prejudice you got from that comment?
  - CameronNemo 5y ago
    Building a wall to keep the Mexicans out. Seems pretty fucked up from my POV, somebody who has lived in SoCal for nearly 25 years.

fpoling 5y ago

Soviet Union tried that with semiconductor industry in 1970s and 1980s. They managed to clone 8086 CPU but failed with 286 even after Soviet intelligence had stolen detailed blueprints for Intel manufacturing processes. Similarly Russia failed to create anything close to F22 engines. What is important is manufacturing culture. Without that one can clone a factory, but it will not help with the next generational process. And it is known how to build such culture in relatively short time frame, culture. Just look at Japan, South Korea or Taiwan.

jollybean 5y ago
Good point, but 'manufacturing culture' is also dependent on the prevailing 'regular culture' and also 'conditions'. Japan, SK and Taiwan are the kinds of places where you could convince a lot of people to 'do this and that for the good of the country' - especially since they were flat on their backs and rebuilding from nothing, at the same time facing existential external powers. 'Post-War' was a quasi-authoritarian national strategy almost as much as the actual war or preparation for it was. In North America especially, we live in a 'Safe Bubble' we don't really have the sense of existential angst that a place like Korea might have, what with a direct record of thousands of years of war and tumult from any number of neighbours which still exist today. Even in W. Europe the living memory of that stuff seems rather fargone.
SkyMarshal 5y ago
>And it is known how to build such culture in relatively short time frame, culture. Just look at Japan, South Korea or Taiwan. Indeed. To expand on that, there is an economist Richard Werner [1] who has studied that process in depth. The TLDR is that new money/credit creation needs to be allocated primarily toward production and innovation, vs consumption or asset speculation (the three things money can be allocated toward). In post-WWII Japan this process was called "Window Guidance" [2], an informal system by which the BoJ directed the banking system to fund industrial development. The Asian Tigers and then China all copied the model in their development program too, so it's clearly portable, but interestingly remains informal. You would think an effective model like this would be formalized into law at some point. [1]:https://professorwerner.org/; https://professorwerner.org/; https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Richard-Werner https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Richard-Werner [2]:http://princesoftheyen.com/central-bank-money-creation/ http://princesoftheyen.com/central-bank-money-creation/ (scroll down to Window Guidance section).

Qub3d 5y ago

Here's a great video essay on the program: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpgK51w6uhk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpgK51w6uhk

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

jiofih 5y ago

For reference, 50000lbs is 22 tons. Tesla is now using 6000 and 8000 ton casting machines to build the Model Y and Cybertruck chassis. And they come from Europe again!

mcabbott 5y ago
The big Alcoa press is 50_000 tons, not lbs. There are slightly larger ones now, 60, 75ktons. (22 tons is, of course, force that any rail yard could produce a century ago.)
durge 5y ago
I think that is a mistyping - the Alcoa presses are 50,000 tons, not lbs.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
cartoonworld 5y ago
Indeed I made a couple of typos. But this is a great opportunity to observe some of the engineering challenges with these advanced manufacturing techniques. Tesla Model S and X were constructed with alloy control arms (Tesla calls them 'fore links') which sometimes did not meet specifications, resulting in catastrophic failures[0] termed "Wompy Wheel" in the press. I don't know if they are extruded or forged, I think they are extrusions but I haven't had a really close look. One thing that I've noticed about the failures is that the control arms have what appear to me to be unusually large rubber bushings. I don't know what conclusions can be drawn from that observation, but there it is. I would speculate that the largeish bushings provide improved ride quality. On another note, Tesla wheels were kind of weirdly large, with uncommon tire specs. I've had the opportunity to examine some more resent Tesla suspension components and they appear quite resilient. However, YMMV, I am not an X-Ray. [0] https://www.motorbiscuit.com/this-is-bad-whompy-wheel-syndrom-causing-teslas-to-crash/ https://www.motorbiscuit.com/this-is-bad-whompy-wheel-syndro...

laurent92 5y ago

Sure, but which technology should USA reproduce. Just chips, and then be late on everything else? No. There is a gigantic machine in China, its name is Shenzen. Its magic is that you can find any part and people who can rebuild them differently. This is the entire “valley” that USA should bring back home. USA should bring back the construction of the Macbooks, phones, servers and routers, and the entire ecosystem of tinkering that comes with it. This is the backbone of USA’s national security. We just have to acknowledge that having local industries means having poverty and dirty waste disposal at home instead of 9000km away. Which is not necessarily a bad thing either, so we can innovate on efforts.

azernik 5y ago
> Sure, but which technology should USA reproduce. Just chips, and then be late on everything else? Whichever ones are essential to national security. The ability to manufacture local, trusted hardware is important for military purposes, just like the ability to manufacture high-performance aircraft parts was and is important in the case that overseas suppliers are hostile or cut off.
- iancmceachern 5y ago
  The DMEA in Sacramento basically does this. https://federallabs.org/labs/defense-microelectronics-activity-dmea https://federallabs.org/labs/defense-microelectronics-activi...
petra 5y ago
There's a lot of talk about the tinkering culture of Shenzen, but is it really related to innovation? Has Shenzen become a startup hub? What large startups have come out of it?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- frisco 5y ago
  Tencent, Bytedance, Huawei, DJI, SenseTime, ZTE? At least back in ~2015 when I visited, it was definitely a major startup hub.

AngryData 5y ago

Quick correction, those are 50,000 ton presses, not lbs.

cartoonworld 5y ago
Yes, thank you. I made an error, thanks for the correction. Hopefully people watch the DoD film linked in op :)