> Certainly we can't overnight, but it doesn't mean we can't at all or that we couldn't or shouldn't try to, generally speaking. Ok, but we have tried. A numbe

> Certainly we can't overnight, but it doesn't mean we can't at all or that we couldn't or shouldn't try to, generally speaking. Ok, but we have tried. A number of times. And it has failed. Ironically, foreign car companies probably do the best job with doing manufacturing plants in the US right now. But many of the experiments to bring manufacturing back to the US, especially with electronics, have failed. See also the Foxconn disaster in Wisconsin that cost billions but never got off the ground. And the attempts by Apple, Motorola and others to make products here. And the flat-out education crisis that has prevented more chip fabs from even being built stateside. I’m not saying don’t try. But we have tried. And it has failed. Abs the quality of labor is more expensive and worse and I don’t blame any company for looking elsewhere. > it can also mean actual national security concerns relative to geopolitical and strategic realities that necesitate hire costs that outweigh other benefits. Ok, but “assembled in America” wouldn’t solve this. Almost every single part — the semiconductor, the memory, the screens, the screws, the plastic or aluminum housings, the batteries, the battery controllers, are made in China or Vietnam or Taiwan. Using minerals sourced from Africa or South America or whatever. So unless you can move the entire supply chain to this region (and we do not have the labor, skilled or unskilled to do any of that), a supply chain that has been carefully and meticulously setup for maximum tax benefits for all parties involved, what benefit is achieved of having a person in America assemble a phone with an SoC and RAM and an SSD that was still made in Asia? If there is a national security concern, that concern will exist whether the product is assembled in Texas or in Shenzhen. If there is going to be a back door, it’ll come in anyway. Even the solution of building for fabs here (which we should do and should have started investing in at least a decade ago) is difficult because we don’t have the labor figures to staff this fabs. And those fabs are largely skilled jobs. TSMC and others are offering insane amounts of money to college grads to move to Asia to work in the fabs. Intel is way behind on building new fabs and part of that is labor-related. And although Intel is based in the US, it doesn’t make the chips that run in 99% of the world’s electronics. I’m not saying there aren’t potential security problems. I’m saying that those will exist regardless of where stuff is assembled and that globally, being able to upend the whole state of supply chain and logistics away from Asia and into another geographic area is something that would take a decade on the low-end and the parts of the world that would be well-equipped to take on that sort of load (Vietnam, India, some parts of Central and South America), have their own major geopolitical struggles. It’s a difficult problem to solve and we should absolutely be less reliant on one region for all of our manufacturing, but we need to acknowledge this isn’t a problem that can be solved quickly or that frankly, the US is well-positioned to solve at all.