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the gist is: When you can manufacture ships, you can also manufacture warships. When you can manufacture warships, you can protect your economy. or: If all you

• squigz 1y ago
  Was mask manufacturing capacity during the pandemic an issue?
  • hudon 1y ago
    Yes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shortages_related_to_the_COVID-19_pandemic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shortages_related_to_the_COVID...
    • manwe150 1y ago
      Both yes and no. It was a brief lack of available local stock from suddenly unexpected demand, followed by a lack of factories willing to stop doing well paid work to switch to making cheap masks, while we waited for even cheaper masks to get made and imported from countries with cheap labor, followed by a surplus of masks (source: a brief chat with a factory manager in my social network who was considering whether he could at least break even on costs and labor if temporarily switching to making masks)
      • mitthrowaway2 1y ago
        Even then, there weren't enough melt spinning machines in North America to make the necessary raw materials, and the lead time on new machines was too long to address the shortage in time to respond to the needs of a pandemic. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/n95-mask-shortage-melt-blown-filters/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/n95-mask-shortage-melt-blown-fi...
  • mitthrowaway2 1y ago
    Yes, it was a severe and acute issue.
  • olyjohn 1y ago
    I think so, isn't that why they brought in all the KN95 masks? The K meaning "Korean."
    • TylerE 1y ago
      KN95 is Chinese.
  • throwup238 1y ago
    Yes, and the American N95+ mask manufacturers didn't want to risk another boom-bust cycle so when the government wouldn't guarantee them a long term purchase deal, they couldn't ramp up. They had gone through this same scenario during the first SARS scare and almost went bankrupt when everyone went back to buying cheaper imported masks. https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/in-the-early-days-of-the-pandemic-the-us-government-turned-down-an-offer-to-manufacture-millions-of-n95-masks-in-america/2020/05/09/f76a821e-908a-11ea-a9c0-73b93422d691_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/in-the-early-d...
• Loughla 1y ago
  Isn't it better just to own the debt of other countries?
  • anarticle 1y ago
    Only if you can enforce it when there is a default. The odds against which was assumed to be zero is becoming nonzero.
• slg 1y ago
  >the gist is: When you can manufacture ships, you can also manufacture warships. When you can manufacture warships, you can protect your economy. The counter to this thinking is that if you intertwine your economic wellbeing with your "enemy" to the point that neither side wants to sever the relationship, you won't need to build many warships. Reversing course back towards isolation in order to give yourself the option to build warships increases the odds that you will end up having to build those warships because you have now made it easier for both countries to go to war.
  • gedy 1y ago
    But China is and has been producing warships at a rapid pace for some time.
    • tastyfreeze 1y ago
      Not only that, all ships they produce are required to meet their military standards. The are all dual use.
  • deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  • knubie 1y ago
    > The counter to this thinking is that if you intertwine your economic wellbeing with your "enemy" to the point that neither side wants to sever the relationship You mean like how Europe has made themselves completely dependent on Russia for energy? How's that working out?
    • mmooss 1y ago
      You've picked one example, but there are many other examples of it working - such as the EU itself. Before the predecessor of the EU was formed, you may recall two massive, Europe-wide wars in half a century.
  • blululu 1y ago
    In 2020 during the largest public health crisis in a century, non-woven respiratory masks were found to be an effective intervention. The country that manufactured 90% of the world's respiratory masks took care of itself first and foremost at the expense of all other countries. You can't blame them for doing so, but you can avoid this scenario repeating itself in the future.
• trhway 1y ago
  >the gist is: When you can manufacture ships, you can also manufacture warships. Not really. Most of the complexity and value and technology lies in the difference between a civilian ship and a warship. Guns, radars, missiles, gas turbines - all that much more complex and involved tech than just a metal bathtub with a diesel that a regular civilian ship is. Nuclear aircraft carrier has even less common with a civilian ship. Submarine - pretty much nothing in common. >or: If all you sell are financial services, and a pandemic hits and you need to protect your people, where will you find masks? Well, we know that emergency stockpile wasn't maintained as a money saving measure. When you sell finservices you actually have more money to maintain stockpile than when you're manufacturing masks. Yet if you're choosing to not maintain the stockpile ...
• Spooky23 1y ago
  We had a little event a few years ago that answered your question. You give people money and they make crap. I helped procure like 30M masks. Nature finds a way. As a society, we’re more productive than we ever have been. We’re not breaking society to create a nation of workshops. This is a cynical power play.
  • mmooss 1y ago
    > We’re not breaking society to create a nation of workshops. That's what Mao tried in the Great Leap Forward: They tried to shift steel production to a cottage industry in back yards. You can imagine the results. And also relevant: Everyone learned to say whatever Mao wanted to hear, so they all reported high and increasing production. It turns out that disinformation isn't economically productive, even if it feels that way - you can't make cars out of it.
    • WalterBright 1y ago
      The Soviet Union was famous for imaginary factories cranking out imaginary tractors.
• mmooss 1y ago
  > we just need to become a lot more productive than we are now. To nitpick about terminology: productivity = output / input The US would (and maybe will) become less productive; the US is not as efficient at producing many things as non-U.S. competitors, including ship-building. The US is more productive at other things, such as software. (And in 2025, you certainly would trade ship-building productivity for software productivity. Including in warfare.) If we insist on building ships in the US, we spend more money on the same ships, and - unavoidably - we must shift more productive resources to these less productive tasks. If your neighbor is a great carpenter and you are a great farmer, wouldn't it be smart to trade your vegetables for carpentry, instead of you trying to do carpentry and the carpenter trying to grow vegetables? If you are a Linux maintainer end and the business down the hall back end, do you try to do back end and they try to design OSes? Why? (Of course, you probably trade your skills indirectly through the wonderful fungibility of money.)
  • hudon 1y ago
    If the carpenter owns weapons, a lot of my farmland, a lot of shares in my farming business, and my debt… I will learn to build my own crossbow
    • mmooss 1y ago
      Unless you have a lot of skill, you are better off buying crossbows from someone who knows how to make them and is good at it. The carpenter will.
• Tiktaalik 1y ago
  The USA is already a lot more productive than everyone else. This is because the USA generates an enormous amount of wealth through very few people thanks to its technology and finance industry. Irony is that there's no end to handwringing editorials in Canada about our "productivity gap" between us and the USA and the USA under Trump is wanting to move itself backward and become less productive. Everyone else in the G7 wishes they were as productive as the USA. The solution to the problem posed here is for the USA to use its incredible wealth deriving from its incredible productivity to buy the warships from Poland etc.
  • klooney 1y ago
    > thanks to its technology and finance industry There's been a great sucking sound from all the electrical and mechanical engineers switching to writing CRUD apps because the pay is double.
    • WalterBright 1y ago
      I switched from mechanical engineering to writing software because of the instant gratification of software machines. If you're designing a gearbox, it takes years to see the actual hardware, and you'd better have gotten the design right the first try, as changing the box gets very expensive. I would have been much happier as an engineer working next to the shop where I could partner with the machinists.
• snowwrestler 1y ago
  The U.S. already manufactures warships, though, and we’re already by far the best at it. Not only do we already protect our economy, we protect pretty much all shipping on the high seas by all economies on the globe. The John F Kennedy—built in the U.S.!—is in sea trials this year to become the 12th nuclear aircraft carrier in the U.S. fleet. No other nation has more than two carriers. The U.S. has more aircraft carriers operating as museums than other nations have in military service. What about subs? Again, the U.S. has more than anyone else and Australia just cancelled a deal with France in order to buy subs built in the U.S. We build the best in the world. I belabor this to make a point: a lot of what people think we need to do… we already have. Our nation and our economy is already the most secure on Earth. We are already the best in the world at making weapons. That never got outsourced, so we don’t need to dramatically reconfigure our economy to bring it back.
  • klooney 1y ago
    > The U.S. already manufactures warships, though, and we’re already by far the best at it. We very slowly build a small number of incredibly expensive ships. For any other value of "manufacturers warships", Korea or Italy are better and more reliable. Also, it's not clear if aircraft carriers are survivable in a vaguely peer context. Missiles and drones have come a long way. > Australia just cancelled a deal with France in order to buy subs built in the U.S. We build the best in the world We won't be sending them because we can't build them because our defense shipbuilding industry is moribund, and there is no civilian shipbuilding industry to do double duty.
    • jopsen 1y ago
      Wouldn't you be better off buying ships from allies? Nobody does everything.
      • kashunstva 1y ago
        > buying ships from allies In 2025, is the word “ally” even a legitimate term in the U.S. political lexicon?
      • 1y ago