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> Is it that the US ship builders aren't competent Yes, they are woefully uncompetitive. They produce single-digit numbers of commercial oceangoing ships annua

> Is it that the US ship builders aren't competent Yes, they are woefully uncompetitive. They produce single-digit numbers of commercial oceangoing ships annually, at 2-4x the cost of elsewhere. It’s an industry on life support.

delfinom 2y ago
The same industry is currently crying they can't people to work the shipbuilding jobs. Heh
beloch 2y ago
Canada has the same problem with building icebreakers. The problem with icebreakers capable of dealing with multi-year ice is that they're a very expensive and specialized kind of ship that's hard to construct, but also the sort of ship that has a very long lifetime. Only a few governments in the world have any need of such ships, and they typically only need a few in the span of many decades. By the time Canada got around to looking for new icebreakers, not a single shipyard in the country had made one in many decades. Ordering a ship from someplace foreign that had actually made one recently would be cheaper than trying to make one domestically. However, then shipyards that haven't made an icebreaker for twenty years would become shipyards that haven't made one for forty years. It really would make a lot of sense for close allies like Canada and the U.S. to collaborate on building icebreakers.
- thfuran 2y ago
  >However, then shipyards that haven't made an icebreaker for twenty years would become shipyards that haven't made one for forty years. Is there really much difference?
  - Teever 2y ago
    Yes. The longer that a shipyard goes with fewer and fewer contracts the more likely it is to go out of business. And it's far harder to get a ship built at a yard that is out of business than one that isn't.
    - Sakos 2y ago
      Also, shipyards that recently built one are more likely to get contracts to build more. Because other countries will be facing the same question.
      - bruce511 2y ago
        More likely though isn't the same as likely. If I'm going to buy an icebreaker from a foreign supplier, sure the US is in the market, but they're still more expensive and take longer than Finland. To get good at something, good enough that you're competitive on the world stage, you need to be building lots, iterating, getting feedback and so on. The US coast guard doesn't have the need to kick-start that sort of scale of development. So it takes a fortune (think 10s of billions) to catch up to the Finns. But the headline number is somewhat irrelevant. 300m sent to Finland is "gone forever". 1.1 billion spent in the US boosts the economy, and ultimately works its way back to the govt in taxes. The benefits have little to do with "preserving skillset" and more to do with the economic benefit of circulating another billion in the local economy.
        bostik 2y ago
        > But the headline number is somewhat irrelevant. 300m sent to Finland is "gone forever". Even with the quotes, as a Finn I find this statement rather tasteless. Or would you also claim that cross-border trade with more nearby nations is "money gone forever"?
        skinkestek 2y ago
        Some people seems to be willing to spend significantly more if it means no one else makes a profit from it. On a national level I understand the interest to keep investments within country borders. For a random person or company I don't get it (except for very specific cases like voting with our wallets against dictatorships like China).
        bruce511 2y ago
        I didn't mean it to be tasteless, and it wasn't personal against Finland. My point was that "internal spending" and "external spending " are not (economically the same thing. Obviously, Finland wants to export - tests a given - but the price tag of a Finnish ship and a US ship are not the same unit.
  - kjs3 2y ago
    Well...it's reasonable for the shipyard to still employ folks with hands on experience 20 years later. I occasionally get tapped to pitch in on things I did 20 years ago (even if it's just "why the hell did you do this?"), and shipbuilding changes vastly slower than my gig. That's much less likely 40 years on.
  - elygre 2y ago
    Possibly this: In twenty years, the experience retires. In forty, it dies.
- morkalork 2y ago
  Like this? https://www.reuters.com/world/us-canada-finland-launch-effort-build-ice-breaking-ships-china-russia-cooperate-2024-07-11/ https://www.reuters.com/world/us-canada-finland-launch-effor...
- ChiMan 2y ago
  Finland is part of NATO. The US and Canada should collaborate with it too. Sharing knowledge is a perfect way for European NATO allies to carry more of the collective defense burden.
  - helsinkiandrew 2y ago
    It's an interesting side note that in the 80's the Soviet Union, despite having a large icebreaking ship building capabilities, also bought icebreakers from Finland (then not a member of NATO) Including a couple of Nuclear ones (they fitted the nuclear engine themselves): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaygach_(1989_icebreaker) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaygach_(1989_icebreaker)
    - jillesvangurp 2y ago
      When I was living in Helsinki, there were two huge icebreakers there whose main job it was to keep the baltic see open for the Russians. I think that probably changed a bit since they joined NATO. I guess that aside from Alaska, the US doesn't have to deal with a lot of sea ice and isn't that dependent on arctic shipping routes. For Russia that's very different. The sea near St Petersburg can freeze over and Murmansk is also hard to reach in winter. And with Svebastopol and the black see fleet out of action, those would be strategically important for Russia. And they rely on the northern arctic route for trade with China as well.
      - helsinkiandrew 2y ago
        Sisu and Urho - they're still there - along with newer sister ships. Visible from satellite view of Google Maps. https://maps.app.goo.gl/rUq42cC1xFhUB8ij9 https://maps.app.goo.gl/rUq42cC1xFhUB8ij9
      - ImJamal 2y ago
        The US Navy will send ships in the Arctic Ocean past Alaska. It tends to be more common for submarines to be there, but surface ships do go there on occasion.
  - 2y ago
faangguyindia 2y ago
Recently OpenAI is failing to compete with Google's hardware and has asked US government for 5Gigawatt data center.
hintymad 2y ago
Curious why the US does not think this is a big problem. I mean, look at the US 80 years ago. The US easily out produced the Axis. We could produce faster and cheaper. There's really no excuse that the cost of making canon shells is 10x higher than Russia. Isn't being able to manufacturing cheaply the signature of a highly developed society? Besides, expertise is not just volumes of blueprints, right? We can only keep our expertise by actively doing. If the next war breaks out, how would the US win? By sending armies of lawyers and coders?
- throwup238 2y ago
  The US outproduced the axis towards the end of the war but it was a real mess for the first few years while industries retooled and the government broke through obstacles like the aluminum cartel. It was only after Pearl Harbor and the formation of the War Production Board in 1942 that manufacturing really picked up because everyone felt the existential threat and organized against it. The US can’t make cheap artillery shells because we don’t have much artillery manufacturing. Our armies just don’t use much artillery. We use mostly guided munitions dropped from planes and rockets fired from the ground, whereas Russian doctrine has always focused on artillery.
  - cpursley 2y ago
    Russia is out producing the US on guided munitions and rockets fired from the ground as well (and missile defense). And icebreakers, of course. So it’s doable - just depends on priorities (ie, moving chip manufacturing back which seems to have us recent success).
    - Sakos 2y ago
      US shipyards and military production are extremely low on any number of metrics. It's unclear even now whether the US has enough stockpiles and enough production of modern munitions to maintain an active war against a peer adversary like China with such massive production capacity and such a massive population. At some point, you do need constant production of enough munitions, doesn't matter how smart or precise those might be. Just recently a US navy tanker ran aground and now they're scrambling to find some way to fuel the carrier group in the middle east because for some reason that's the only one that was available. The navy logistics group is woefully understaffed und under-equipped. What are the priorities in actuality? Because maintaining a military at adequate readiness doesn't seem to be at the top of the list.
fsckboy 2y ago
>woefully uncompetitive. They produce single-digit numbers of commercial oceangoing ships annually, at 2-4x the cost of elsewhere unions and pro union legislation makes US shipbuilding uncompetitive. it also ruins US merchant marine. We could encourage it, but the world market is fairly competitive so we don't really need to, except for defense.
- bluGill 2y ago
  Other countries have unions too. I don't know the situation in Finland, but they are surrounded by countries that have even stronger union and union laws that the US. (and some of those countries also have ship building)
- ghnws 2y ago
  Ship building, like most other industries, is unionized in Finland and I would be surprised if it wasn't the same in Germany.
throwaway290 2y ago
The question was, is it uncompetitive because self-imposed requirements/limtiations are stricter or because of lack of competence. You are answering something else

delfinom 2y ago

The same industry is currently crying they can't people to work the shipbuilding jobs. Heh

beloch 2y ago

Canada has the same problem with building icebreakers. The problem with icebreakers capable of dealing with multi-year ice is that they're a very expensive and specialized kind of ship that's hard to construct, but also the sort of ship that has a very long lifetime. Only a few governments in the world have any need of such ships, and they typically only need a few in the span of many decades. By the time Canada got around to looking for new icebreakers, not a single shipyard in the country had made one in many decades. Ordering a ship from someplace foreign that had actually made one recently would be cheaper than trying to make one domestically. However, then shipyards that haven't made an icebreaker for twenty years would become shipyards that haven't made one for forty years. It really would make a lot of sense for close allies like Canada and the U.S. to collaborate on building icebreakers.

thfuran 2y ago
>However, then shipyards that haven't made an icebreaker for twenty years would become shipyards that haven't made one for forty years. Is there really much difference?
- Teever 2y ago
  Yes. The longer that a shipyard goes with fewer and fewer contracts the more likely it is to go out of business. And it's far harder to get a ship built at a yard that is out of business than one that isn't.
  - Sakos 2y ago
    Also, shipyards that recently built one are more likely to get contracts to build more. Because other countries will be facing the same question.
    - bruce511 2y ago
      More likely though isn't the same as likely. If I'm going to buy an icebreaker from a foreign supplier, sure the US is in the market, but they're still more expensive and take longer than Finland. To get good at something, good enough that you're competitive on the world stage, you need to be building lots, iterating, getting feedback and so on. The US coast guard doesn't have the need to kick-start that sort of scale of development. So it takes a fortune (think 10s of billions) to catch up to the Finns. But the headline number is somewhat irrelevant. 300m sent to Finland is "gone forever". 1.1 billion spent in the US boosts the economy, and ultimately works its way back to the govt in taxes. The benefits have little to do with "preserving skillset" and more to do with the economic benefit of circulating another billion in the local economy.
      - bostik 2y ago
        > But the headline number is somewhat irrelevant. 300m sent to Finland is "gone forever". Even with the quotes, as a Finn I find this statement rather tasteless. Or would you also claim that cross-border trade with more nearby nations is "money gone forever"?
        skinkestek 2y ago
        Some people seems to be willing to spend significantly more if it means no one else makes a profit from it. On a national level I understand the interest to keep investments within country borders. For a random person or company I don't get it (except for very specific cases like voting with our wallets against dictatorships like China).
        bruce511 2y ago
        I didn't mean it to be tasteless, and it wasn't personal against Finland. My point was that "internal spending" and "external spending " are not (economically the same thing. Obviously, Finland wants to export - tests a given - but the price tag of a Finnish ship and a US ship are not the same unit.
- kjs3 2y ago
  Well...it's reasonable for the shipyard to still employ folks with hands on experience 20 years later. I occasionally get tapped to pitch in on things I did 20 years ago (even if it's just "why the hell did you do this?"), and shipbuilding changes vastly slower than my gig. That's much less likely 40 years on.
- elygre 2y ago
  Possibly this: In twenty years, the experience retires. In forty, it dies.
morkalork 2y ago
Like this? https://www.reuters.com/world/us-canada-finland-launch-effort-build-ice-breaking-ships-china-russia-cooperate-2024-07-11/ https://www.reuters.com/world/us-canada-finland-launch-effor...
ChiMan 2y ago
Finland is part of NATO. The US and Canada should collaborate with it too. Sharing knowledge is a perfect way for European NATO allies to carry more of the collective defense burden.
- helsinkiandrew 2y ago
  It's an interesting side note that in the 80's the Soviet Union, despite having a large icebreaking ship building capabilities, also bought icebreakers from Finland (then not a member of NATO) Including a couple of Nuclear ones (they fitted the nuclear engine themselves): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaygach_(1989_icebreaker) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaygach_(1989_icebreaker)
  - jillesvangurp 2y ago
    When I was living in Helsinki, there were two huge icebreakers there whose main job it was to keep the baltic see open for the Russians. I think that probably changed a bit since they joined NATO. I guess that aside from Alaska, the US doesn't have to deal with a lot of sea ice and isn't that dependent on arctic shipping routes. For Russia that's very different. The sea near St Petersburg can freeze over and Murmansk is also hard to reach in winter. And with Svebastopol and the black see fleet out of action, those would be strategically important for Russia. And they rely on the northern arctic route for trade with China as well.
    - helsinkiandrew 2y ago
      Sisu and Urho - they're still there - along with newer sister ships. Visible from satellite view of Google Maps. https://maps.app.goo.gl/rUq42cC1xFhUB8ij9 https://maps.app.goo.gl/rUq42cC1xFhUB8ij9
    - ImJamal 2y ago
      The US Navy will send ships in the Arctic Ocean past Alaska. It tends to be more common for submarines to be there, but surface ships do go there on occasion.
- 2y ago

faangguyindia 2y ago

Recently OpenAI is failing to compete with Google's hardware and has asked US government for 5Gigawatt data center.

hintymad 2y ago

Curious why the US does not think this is a big problem. I mean, look at the US 80 years ago. The US easily out produced the Axis. We could produce faster and cheaper. There's really no excuse that the cost of making canon shells is 10x higher than Russia. Isn't being able to manufacturing cheaply the signature of a highly developed society? Besides, expertise is not just volumes of blueprints, right? We can only keep our expertise by actively doing. If the next war breaks out, how would the US win? By sending armies of lawyers and coders?

throwup238 2y ago
The US outproduced the axis towards the end of the war but it was a real mess for the first few years while industries retooled and the government broke through obstacles like the aluminum cartel. It was only after Pearl Harbor and the formation of the War Production Board in 1942 that manufacturing really picked up because everyone felt the existential threat and organized against it. The US can’t make cheap artillery shells because we don’t have much artillery manufacturing. Our armies just don’t use much artillery. We use mostly guided munitions dropped from planes and rockets fired from the ground, whereas Russian doctrine has always focused on artillery.
- cpursley 2y ago
  Russia is out producing the US on guided munitions and rockets fired from the ground as well (and missile defense). And icebreakers, of course. So it’s doable - just depends on priorities (ie, moving chip manufacturing back which seems to have us recent success).
  - Sakos 2y ago
    US shipyards and military production are extremely low on any number of metrics. It's unclear even now whether the US has enough stockpiles and enough production of modern munitions to maintain an active war against a peer adversary like China with such massive production capacity and such a massive population. At some point, you do need constant production of enough munitions, doesn't matter how smart or precise those might be. Just recently a US navy tanker ran aground and now they're scrambling to find some way to fuel the carrier group in the middle east because for some reason that's the only one that was available. The navy logistics group is woefully understaffed und under-equipped. What are the priorities in actuality? Because maintaining a military at adequate readiness doesn't seem to be at the top of the list.

fsckboy 2y ago

>woefully uncompetitive. They produce single-digit numbers of commercial oceangoing ships annually, at 2-4x the cost of elsewhere unions and pro union legislation makes US shipbuilding uncompetitive. it also ruins US merchant marine. We could encourage it, but the world market is fairly competitive so we don't really need to, except for defense.

bluGill 2y ago
Other countries have unions too. I don't know the situation in Finland, but they are surrounded by countries that have even stronger union and union laws that the US. (and some of those countries also have ship building)
ghnws 2y ago
Ship building, like most other industries, is unionized in Finland and I would be surprised if it wasn't the same in Germany.

throwaway290 2y ago

The question was, is it uncompetitive because self-imposed requirements/limtiations are stricter or because of lack of competence. You are answering something else