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> A better question might be who cares. The number of shoes is not a good indicator of national power. In fact, no single technology is a good indicator of nat

> A better question might be who cares. The number of shoes is not a good indicator of national power. In fact, no single technology is a good indicator of national power ... The concept of a “race” itself is a questionable legacy of Cold War thinking – the Cold War had a finish line (identified by Eisenhower and Dulles at the onset), while the current situation does not.

ajsnigrutin 2y ago
A single technology, maybe not... but once more than half of your supermarkets are "made in china", from simple tools (knives, forks), to clothes (well.. and shoes) to electronics and even food...then you have a problem. US might be full of people who can make social media apps, not many who can build a factory and actually produce stuff, and this was discussed here before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36828861 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36828861 (same goes fo EU).
- alephnerd 2y ago
  Read TFA. There's a reason I posted it. Also visit a Costco or Walmart next time and look at the "Made in" tag.
- fnordpiglet 2y ago
  The problem with that is it’s not actually true. Yes most low end stuff consumers buy is made in China. But US manufacturing is primarily high end - stuff that’s extremely exacting, precise, and technologically advanced that sells to corporations and governments. The fact that Tesla started their factories here then rolled it out as a pattern globally is illustrative of this. Further, when you consider the aggregate production in Mexico, Vietnam, Malaysia, Taiwan, Japan, Thailand, etc and recognize that an awful lot of it, including electronics, is managed and built by US manufacturing outssourcers like Jabil, it become pretty obvious the US hasn’t lost its edge in manufacturing. It’s just shut down the Knick nack production onshore. Rebuilding those factories in a crisis could be done rapidly, and the labor skill required to oversee a machine pressing scissors is pretty low - that’s why it can be offshored to an unskilled labor pool with such ease. China dominates these through a willingness to exploit itself for a very low margin and extreme scales. These are definitely advantages - if you don’t care about your people and are willing to destroy your environment for dominance in producing forks, you’ll probably be allowed to. The margins are so low and the barrier to reentry is tiny.
  - ajsnigrutin 2y ago
    But the people who built those production lines are still in china (and a few other places). In a case of a wider trade war with china, where are the people who built eg. foxconn? Are there enough US apple employees with skills to recreate production in US? High end custom stuff, sure... but at the end of the day, you need cheap shoes for millions of people to wear every day, and not a lot of those are made in US. I live in a small eu country and here, the chinese (hisense) bought one of our companies, just to be able to do the final assembly stage of electronics, to stick the "made in eu" sticker on.. everything else is done elswehere, including that companies original products. And we used to be a former socialist country that produced everything, from cars to computers, tvs, etc.... now we don't have enough basic electricians and plumbers for household work, before even thinking about building any kind of massive production facilities. Even kids want to be influencers, not assembly line workers (and we have to import those too).
    - thriftwy 2y ago
      Why would kids ever want to be assembly line workers? If you find that area of work attractive, why don't you start with yourself becoming one?
      - readyman 2y ago
        Very simple. Because those jobs were once available in mass without an extremely expensive risk of college debt, often unionized and provided good stable salaries that raised many millions of healthy families and provided pensions that have allowed for healthy retirement.
        thriftwy 2y ago
        That's what you do for a living, but not something you want to do as a kid. Unless there are kids with middle-aged mentality.
        ajsnigrutin 2y ago
- dgeiser13 2y ago
  In the US the term supermarket is synonymous with grocery store. There will never be a point where an American supermarket will have half of it's products made in China. That being said almost all of the non-grocery products in the U.S. are already made elsewhere with cheap labor, i.e. Asia, Latin and South America, etc.
maxglute 2y ago
> A better question might be who cares. I assuming James Lewis of Strategic Technologies Program should: >The digital economy depends on cloud computing, next generation networks (like 5G and 6G), and software (like AI products) and these are technologies where the United States has a strong if not dominant position. Focuses on counter-productive digital economy i.e. tutoring, that PRC deliberately crushed to redirect effort at synergizing digital economy with real economy, i.e. ai to boost industrial output and now we are seeing intelligent gigafactory efforts accross multiple strategic sectors. Sure no one proxy indicator matters, but multiple proxy indicators across value chain and S&T do, and we're not talking about shoes, which no one thinks is a "crucial" industry. Like if article was titled US is losing the, ship building, renewable energy, ev, hypersonics, shoe race, readers would go, that's a few fairly important sectors to lag on, also whytf is shoes in there. >China is good at manufacturing what others have invented but no longer so good at innovation itself. This is the result of political change. China was becoming a leading innovator when it was politically open, before 2012. ... Under different political leadership, China would be a much more formidable competitor, but China made a political decision that values continued party control over innovation and its ability to innovate is at risk. It's telling he thinks PRC pre 2012 (aka pre Xi) was more innovative. Going to chalk it up to another blob shibboleth to not fall out of favour with Washington Overton masters from how often I see this repeated all of a sudden. Reality seems to be PRC innovation has enhanced by leap and bounds while retaining massive second mover advantage. They can afford to be a year or two behind on LLM craze and watch US spend trillions to find what's worth replicating/monetizing in the digital space. Meanwhile, US going to have to figure out how to reindustrialize and mass manufacture things it innovates, without all the training data on manufacturing locked in minds of specialists on Chinese manufacturing floors. What's gotten US into current mess is precisely PRC has been exceptionally good at innovating on manufacturing (process) and can out make US using second mover advantage in more and more strategic sectors it choose to catch up on. Yesterday it shoes, tomorrow it's MRIs.
- alephnerd 2y ago
  Please stop interacting with me. I've had discussions with you on HN before and they were fairly acrimonious. If there were block functionality on HN I'd do it to you. I don't want to get banned on HN for flame wars.

ajsnigrutin 2y ago

A single technology, maybe not... but once more than half of your supermarkets are "made in china", from simple tools (knives, forks), to clothes (well.. and shoes) to electronics and even food...then you have a problem. US might be full of people who can make social media apps, not many who can build a factory and actually produce stuff, and this was discussed here before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36828861 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36828861 (same goes fo EU).

alephnerd 2y ago
Read TFA. There's a reason I posted it. Also visit a Costco or Walmart next time and look at the "Made in" tag.
fnordpiglet 2y ago
The problem with that is it’s not actually true. Yes most low end stuff consumers buy is made in China. But US manufacturing is primarily high end - stuff that’s extremely exacting, precise, and technologically advanced that sells to corporations and governments. The fact that Tesla started their factories here then rolled it out as a pattern globally is illustrative of this. Further, when you consider the aggregate production in Mexico, Vietnam, Malaysia, Taiwan, Japan, Thailand, etc and recognize that an awful lot of it, including electronics, is managed and built by US manufacturing outssourcers like Jabil, it become pretty obvious the US hasn’t lost its edge in manufacturing. It’s just shut down the Knick nack production onshore. Rebuilding those factories in a crisis could be done rapidly, and the labor skill required to oversee a machine pressing scissors is pretty low - that’s why it can be offshored to an unskilled labor pool with such ease. China dominates these through a willingness to exploit itself for a very low margin and extreme scales. These are definitely advantages - if you don’t care about your people and are willing to destroy your environment for dominance in producing forks, you’ll probably be allowed to. The margins are so low and the barrier to reentry is tiny.
- ajsnigrutin 2y ago
  But the people who built those production lines are still in china (and a few other places). In a case of a wider trade war with china, where are the people who built eg. foxconn? Are there enough US apple employees with skills to recreate production in US? High end custom stuff, sure... but at the end of the day, you need cheap shoes for millions of people to wear every day, and not a lot of those are made in US. I live in a small eu country and here, the chinese (hisense) bought one of our companies, just to be able to do the final assembly stage of electronics, to stick the "made in eu" sticker on.. everything else is done elswehere, including that companies original products. And we used to be a former socialist country that produced everything, from cars to computers, tvs, etc.... now we don't have enough basic electricians and plumbers for household work, before even thinking about building any kind of massive production facilities. Even kids want to be influencers, not assembly line workers (and we have to import those too).
  - thriftwy 2y ago
    Why would kids ever want to be assembly line workers? If you find that area of work attractive, why don't you start with yourself becoming one?
    - readyman 2y ago
      Very simple. Because those jobs were once available in mass without an extremely expensive risk of college debt, often unionized and provided good stable salaries that raised many millions of healthy families and provided pensions that have allowed for healthy retirement.
      - thriftwy 2y ago
        That's what you do for a living, but not something you want to do as a kid. Unless there are kids with middle-aged mentality.
        ajsnigrutin 2y ago
dgeiser13 2y ago
In the US the term supermarket is synonymous with grocery store. There will never be a point where an American supermarket will have half of it's products made in China. That being said almost all of the non-grocery products in the U.S. are already made elsewhere with cheap labor, i.e. Asia, Latin and South America, etc.

maxglute 2y ago

> A better question might be who cares. I assuming James Lewis of Strategic Technologies Program should: >The digital economy depends on cloud computing, next generation networks (like 5G and 6G), and software (like AI products) and these are technologies where the United States has a strong if not dominant position. Focuses on counter-productive digital economy i.e. tutoring, that PRC deliberately crushed to redirect effort at synergizing digital economy with real economy, i.e. ai to boost industrial output and now we are seeing intelligent gigafactory efforts accross multiple strategic sectors. Sure no one proxy indicator matters, but multiple proxy indicators across value chain and S&T do, and we're not talking about shoes, which no one thinks is a "crucial" industry. Like if article was titled US is losing the, ship building, renewable energy, ev, hypersonics, shoe race, readers would go, that's a few fairly important sectors to lag on, also whytf is shoes in there. >China is good at manufacturing what others have invented but no longer so good at innovation itself. This is the result of political change. China was becoming a leading innovator when it was politically open, before 2012. ... Under different political leadership, China would be a much more formidable competitor, but China made a political decision that values continued party control over innovation and its ability to innovate is at risk. It's telling he thinks PRC pre 2012 (aka pre Xi) was more innovative. Going to chalk it up to another blob shibboleth to not fall out of favour with Washington Overton masters from how often I see this repeated all of a sudden. Reality seems to be PRC innovation has enhanced by leap and bounds while retaining massive second mover advantage. They can afford to be a year or two behind on LLM craze and watch US spend trillions to find what's worth replicating/monetizing in the digital space. Meanwhile, US going to have to figure out how to reindustrialize and mass manufacture things it innovates, without all the training data on manufacturing locked in minds of specialists on Chinese manufacturing floors. What's gotten US into current mess is precisely PRC has been exceptionally good at innovating on manufacturing (process) and can out make US using second mover advantage in more and more strategic sectors it choose to catch up on. Yesterday it shoes, tomorrow it's MRIs.

alephnerd 2y ago
Please stop interacting with me. I've had discussions with you on HN before and they were fairly acrimonious. If there were block functionality on HN I'd do it to you. I don't want to get banned on HN for flame wars.