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>Like with the first round of funding last year, the administration is invoking the Defense Production Act—a long-standing piece of legislation that grants the

>Like with the first round of funding last year, the administration is invoking the Defense Production Act—a long-standing piece of legislation that grants the president the power to ensure the supply of materials needed for national defense. Mark my words, this planned economy stuff is going to come back and bite us...

superkuh 3y ago
I remember when there were tons of subsidies for LED lighting in order to make them competitive with the extremely low prices of incandescent/halogens and their simple low part designs. Then the incandescent/halogen ban went through the the prices of LED light bulbs went through the roof and never came back down. All while LEDs never achieved anything close to the early claims of 100k hours and ended up only be comparable to incandescent in lifetime due to skimping on parts cost in the driver boards. I hope we don't see that play out again with heat pumps. That said, I'm glad there is funding for the design of heat pumps in north american markets. Existing heat pump designs don't really work for continental climate severe cold.
- poulsbohemian 3y ago
  >prices of LED light bulbs went through the roof and never came back down Maybe I'm buying cheap bulbs but the latest ones I've bought have been very reasonably priced and most definitely are lasting longer than incandescent / halogen. I recently replaced some that had been operating for at least 8 years and likely longer.
- sydbarrett74 3y ago
  The fact that LED's run cooler than incandescent bulbs makes a palpable difference in the summer.
- dralley 3y ago
  >All while LEDs never achieved anything close to the early claims of 100k hours and ended up only be comparable to incandescent in lifetime due to skimping on parts cost in the driver boards. I don't know what bulbs you're using but I don't find this to be the case. As an alternative example, the effect of subsidies on the solar panel industry has led to rapid improvements in cost and efficiency.
  - superkuh 3y ago
    Phillips, Cree, and all sorts of generics. If you have good electrical power you won't notice, but if your power is dirty, a loose neutral exists, etc, the driver boards do not last long. Whereas the simple no-circuitry halogens do. And this is especially true in enclosures. It's another situation where the well off remain well off but for the poor the situation gets worse.
    - Jochim 3y ago
      Anecdotally, I've replaced more halogens than any other kind of bulb. I'm assuming it was the fixture that was causing it. They were cheap but they guzzled power.
    - JKCalhoun 3y ago
      Planned obsolescence? Big Clive of YouTube fame has shown many times over that modest changes to the driver board of commercial LED lights will allow them to last indefinitely. You have to wonder if the manufacturers don't know this.
poulsbohemian 3y ago
What do you see being the potential negative outcomes?
- whatshisface 3y ago
  Well, since the defense production act was created to allow the government to divert capacity the most obvious negative outcome would be the loss of whatever the capacity was doing to begin with. Perhaps the more dangerous outcome for as long as the budgets remain small is the government playing favorites. "You better donate to the right party and hire the right retiring regulators, or the government won't start a defense production program for your industry." Now that companies have an incentive to bend the administration's picture of what products will help the climate you can guess what will happen. Once the relationships are built up the effects will extend beyond individual programs. Also, the defense industry is one of the least efficient and most lobbyist-driven/build-fifty-parts-in-fifty-states/friends-with-the-colonel institutions in our system. We begrudgingly accept it because, what's the alternative? - but if you wish that on the rest of the economy you must want the terrorists to win. ;-)
  - dralley 3y ago
    >the most obvious negative outcome would be the loss of whatever the capacity was doing to begin with. As long as VC is lighting money on fire on obviously stupid ventures like Juciero and subsidizing Uber/Lyft rides to far below cost for a decade, NFTs, and transparent frauds like FTX, it's hard to get worked up about government deciding to make sure our basic national security needs are covered. VC has not proven themselves to be paragons of free private market efficiency for the past decade.
    - whatshisface 3y ago
      There's almost no overlap between VC and anything involving sheet metal. In fact the way manufacturing events never make it out of industry press is a good sign the troubles will need to get very bad indeed before the feedback in the democratic system begins to control them.
pydry 3y ago
That's the kind of thing western neoliberal economists used to say about China in the 1990s - it was only hurting itself with all this central planning, etc. and if it wanted to really grow it should go fully unplanned, release capital controls, instead of this hybrid central planning/capitalist system that theyve got. They sort of seamlessly morphed from that to arguing about how its economic rise can be arrested by slapping tariffs, etc. on them.
- whatshisface 3y ago
  China's growth appears to have halted at a below western standard of living primarily due to government intervention. I am not so sure the economists were wrong.
  - pydry 3y ago
    China's growth is stalling because the export oriented industrialization process it tapping out and because they've already reaped most of the demographic dividend. Can you think of another example of a country that did better by following the standard neoliberal washington consensus advice from the 70s/80s/90s? Chile and Russia are two examples that I can think of that followed western proscriptions at one point (70s/80s and 90s) but it didn't exactly work out well for either of them.
  - klyrs 3y ago
    The globe cannot sustain the entire chinese population at the western rate of consumption. Modern economists aren't known for their ability to think beyond next quarter's earnings.
    - whatshisface 3y ago
      The CCP's motivations for depressing their citizen's standard of living are not out of concern for mother earth...
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
toomuchtodo 3y ago
Bite us worse than manufacturers outsourcing and offshoring [1] already and losing supply chain and manufacturing muscle memory? You would think we would've learned with Boeing [2], but nope, people still complaining planning is a concern vs the free market race to the bottom that has brought us current state. "Protectionism" is a pejorative term used by people who forget the complexity of building at scale, and the cost of losing this capability. Helplessness as a nation state is not a flattering look on the global stage. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrier_Air_Conditioner_move_to_Mexico https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrier_Air_Conditioner_move_t... > A company representative announced the information to an assembly of workers. He said, “The best way to stay competitive and protect the business for long-term is to move production from our facility in Indianapolis to Monterrey, Mexico.” [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39408712 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39408712 ("HN: Employee Turnover Fueled Boeing's Quality Control Nightmare")
- whatshisface 3y ago
  Boeing subsists primarily on defense production. Do we want every American industry to end up like them? Seriously, the faulty airplanes were all built in the US by a company with some of the closest government ties in our economy. It is indeed an example of what fruits use of the defense production act might bear.
  - toomuchtodo 3y ago
    Based on where we're at today, we can only go up. Boeing is an easy fix; nationalize them and fix it. To not do so (and allow incompetent management to remain) is a choice. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38981921 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38981921 ("HN: It's Time to Nationalize and Then Break Up Boeing")
    - whatshisface 3y ago
      Breaking up Boeing is, in a sense, the opposite of nationalizing it. Furthermore nationalizing Boeing would mean buying it from the shareholders, who already have the right to change its management, if they want to. Why don't they want to fire its management? I'd say it's because Boeing is a creature well-adapted to its environment - an environment created by protectionism and defense production contracts.
no_wizard 3y ago
I agree with you, I also see a political thing here that is entirely a reflection of societies inability to bridge political issues and focus on agreeable national issues at this level. Its entirely of "our" own making. The inability to establish bipartisanship in Congress to make congressional sessions more productive and not bogged down along party lines as they are today, more often than not (and increasingly so), leaves the administration with little levers to pull. Given that, we've seen presidents since Reagan use some wonky legal logic to move money around that is very much intended (in the spirit of) something, but used for something else entirely. Very often the places you have the most flexibility for this is defense, because you have the easiest time making a legal case for it if its ever challenged. If we didn't have a dysfunctional congress, which is definitely an extension of dysfunctional politics in the US, they could use the correct levers to create subsidies for this via congressional allocation, but as it sits today, you'd never get a bill through congress.
- whatshisface 3y ago
  I don't think it's fair for people who live in hot climates to pay for the heat pumps of people in cold climates, or for people who can't afford an upgrade to pay for their neighbor's new equipment. That said, yes, absolutely, lawful subsidies are far less of a petri dish for corruption than individual executive interventions.
fatkam 3y ago
The whole economy is rigged in so many ways... "keep the rich rich... make the middle class poorer" is the motto... or maybe it's just "make the rich richer and bomb anyone who disagrees"

superkuh 3y ago

I remember when there were tons of subsidies for LED lighting in order to make them competitive with the extremely low prices of incandescent/halogens and their simple low part designs. Then the incandescent/halogen ban went through the the prices of LED light bulbs went through the roof and never came back down. All while LEDs never achieved anything close to the early claims of 100k hours and ended up only be comparable to incandescent in lifetime due to skimping on parts cost in the driver boards. I hope we don't see that play out again with heat pumps. That said, I'm glad there is funding for the design of heat pumps in north american markets. Existing heat pump designs don't really work for continental climate severe cold.

poulsbohemian 3y ago
>prices of LED light bulbs went through the roof and never came back down Maybe I'm buying cheap bulbs but the latest ones I've bought have been very reasonably priced and most definitely are lasting longer than incandescent / halogen. I recently replaced some that had been operating for at least 8 years and likely longer.
sydbarrett74 3y ago
The fact that LED's run cooler than incandescent bulbs makes a palpable difference in the summer.
dralley 3y ago
>All while LEDs never achieved anything close to the early claims of 100k hours and ended up only be comparable to incandescent in lifetime due to skimping on parts cost in the driver boards. I don't know what bulbs you're using but I don't find this to be the case. As an alternative example, the effect of subsidies on the solar panel industry has led to rapid improvements in cost and efficiency.
- superkuh 3y ago
  Phillips, Cree, and all sorts of generics. If you have good electrical power you won't notice, but if your power is dirty, a loose neutral exists, etc, the driver boards do not last long. Whereas the simple no-circuitry halogens do. And this is especially true in enclosures. It's another situation where the well off remain well off but for the poor the situation gets worse.
  - Jochim 3y ago
    Anecdotally, I've replaced more halogens than any other kind of bulb. I'm assuming it was the fixture that was causing it. They were cheap but they guzzled power.
  - JKCalhoun 3y ago
    Planned obsolescence? Big Clive of YouTube fame has shown many times over that modest changes to the driver board of commercial LED lights will allow them to last indefinitely. You have to wonder if the manufacturers don't know this.

poulsbohemian 3y ago

What do you see being the potential negative outcomes?

whatshisface 3y ago
Well, since the defense production act was created to allow the government to divert capacity the most obvious negative outcome would be the loss of whatever the capacity was doing to begin with. Perhaps the more dangerous outcome for as long as the budgets remain small is the government playing favorites. "You better donate to the right party and hire the right retiring regulators, or the government won't start a defense production program for your industry." Now that companies have an incentive to bend the administration's picture of what products will help the climate you can guess what will happen. Once the relationships are built up the effects will extend beyond individual programs. Also, the defense industry is one of the least efficient and most lobbyist-driven/build-fifty-parts-in-fifty-states/friends-with-the-colonel institutions in our system. We begrudgingly accept it because, what's the alternative? - but if you wish that on the rest of the economy you must want the terrorists to win. ;-)
- dralley 3y ago
  >the most obvious negative outcome would be the loss of whatever the capacity was doing to begin with. As long as VC is lighting money on fire on obviously stupid ventures like Juciero and subsidizing Uber/Lyft rides to far below cost for a decade, NFTs, and transparent frauds like FTX, it's hard to get worked up about government deciding to make sure our basic national security needs are covered. VC has not proven themselves to be paragons of free private market efficiency for the past decade.
  - whatshisface 3y ago
    There's almost no overlap between VC and anything involving sheet metal. In fact the way manufacturing events never make it out of industry press is a good sign the troubles will need to get very bad indeed before the feedback in the democratic system begins to control them.

pydry 3y ago

That's the kind of thing western neoliberal economists used to say about China in the 1990s - it was only hurting itself with all this central planning, etc. and if it wanted to really grow it should go fully unplanned, release capital controls, instead of this hybrid central planning/capitalist system that theyve got. They sort of seamlessly morphed from that to arguing about how its economic rise can be arrested by slapping tariffs, etc. on them.

whatshisface 3y ago
China's growth appears to have halted at a below western standard of living primarily due to government intervention. I am not so sure the economists were wrong.
- pydry 3y ago
  China's growth is stalling because the export oriented industrialization process it tapping out and because they've already reaped most of the demographic dividend. Can you think of another example of a country that did better by following the standard neoliberal washington consensus advice from the 70s/80s/90s? Chile and Russia are two examples that I can think of that followed western proscriptions at one point (70s/80s and 90s) but it didn't exactly work out well for either of them.
- klyrs 3y ago
  The globe cannot sustain the entire chinese population at the western rate of consumption. Modern economists aren't known for their ability to think beyond next quarter's earnings.
  - whatshisface 3y ago
    The CCP's motivations for depressing their citizen's standard of living are not out of concern for mother earth...
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

toomuchtodo 3y ago

Bite us worse than manufacturers outsourcing and offshoring [1] already and losing supply chain and manufacturing muscle memory? You would think we would've learned with Boeing [2], but nope, people still complaining planning is a concern vs the free market race to the bottom that has brought us current state. "Protectionism" is a pejorative term used by people who forget the complexity of building at scale, and the cost of losing this capability. Helplessness as a nation state is not a flattering look on the global stage. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrier_Air_Conditioner_move_to_Mexico https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrier_Air_Conditioner_move_t... > A company representative announced the information to an assembly of workers. He said, “The best way to stay competitive and protect the business for long-term is to move production from our facility in Indianapolis to Monterrey, Mexico.” [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39408712 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39408712 ("HN: Employee Turnover Fueled Boeing's Quality Control Nightmare")

whatshisface 3y ago
Boeing subsists primarily on defense production. Do we want every American industry to end up like them? Seriously, the faulty airplanes were all built in the US by a company with some of the closest government ties in our economy. It is indeed an example of what fruits use of the defense production act might bear.
- toomuchtodo 3y ago
  Based on where we're at today, we can only go up. Boeing is an easy fix; nationalize them and fix it. To not do so (and allow incompetent management to remain) is a choice. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38981921 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38981921 ("HN: It's Time to Nationalize and Then Break Up Boeing")
  - whatshisface 3y ago
    Breaking up Boeing is, in a sense, the opposite of nationalizing it. Furthermore nationalizing Boeing would mean buying it from the shareholders, who already have the right to change its management, if they want to. Why don't they want to fire its management? I'd say it's because Boeing is a creature well-adapted to its environment - an environment created by protectionism and defense production contracts.

no_wizard 3y ago

I agree with you, I also see a political thing here that is entirely a reflection of societies inability to bridge political issues and focus on agreeable national issues at this level. Its entirely of "our" own making. The inability to establish bipartisanship in Congress to make congressional sessions more productive and not bogged down along party lines as they are today, more often than not (and increasingly so), leaves the administration with little levers to pull. Given that, we've seen presidents since Reagan use some wonky legal logic to move money around that is very much intended (in the spirit of) something, but used for something else entirely. Very often the places you have the most flexibility for this is defense, because you have the easiest time making a legal case for it if its ever challenged. If we didn't have a dysfunctional congress, which is definitely an extension of dysfunctional politics in the US, they could use the correct levers to create subsidies for this via congressional allocation, but as it sits today, you'd never get a bill through congress.

whatshisface 3y ago
I don't think it's fair for people who live in hot climates to pay for the heat pumps of people in cold climates, or for people who can't afford an upgrade to pay for their neighbor's new equipment. That said, yes, absolutely, lawful subsidies are far less of a petri dish for corruption than individual executive interventions.

fatkam 3y ago

The whole economy is rigged in so many ways... "keep the rich rich... make the middle class poorer" is the motto... or maybe it's just "make the rich richer and bomb anyone who disagrees"