How much do you think it costs to make a pair of Nike shoes in Asia?

Americans need to get over their view of “Asia” as being about making shoes. When I was working in engineering in the early aughts, we mocked the Chinese as being able only to copy American technology. Today, China is competitive with or ahead of America in key technology areas, including nuclear power, AI, EVs, and batteries.

We need to anticipate a future where China is equal to America on a per capita basis, but four times bigger. Is that a world where “Designed by Apple in California, Made in China” still makes sense? What will be America’s competitive edge in that scenario?

What seems most likely to me in the future is that the US will find itself in the same position the UK is in now. Dominating finance and services won’t mean anything when both the IP and the physical products are being produced somewhere else.

> US will find itself in the same position the UK is in now

The thing is .. there's a point here, but it's not at all tied in with physical products. People are obsessed with one side of the ledger while refusing to see the other. Most of the stuff the UK is struggling with (transport, healthcare, energy) are "state capacity" issues. Things where the state is unavoidably involved and having better, more decisive leadership and not getting bogged down in consultations, would make a big difference.

The UK stepped on its own rake because it was obsessed with tiny, already vanished industries like fishing. Fishing is less profitable for the whole UK than Warhammer. It's not actually where we want to be. While real UK manufacture successes (cars, aircraft, satellites, generators, all sorts of high-tech stuff) get completely ignored. Or bogged down in extra export red tape thanks to Brexit.

To improve reality, we have to start from reality, not whatever vision of the past propaganda "news" channels are blathering about.

> Fishing is less profitable for the whole UK than Warhammer.

This sounded completely insane to me. I tried to look up numbers and found that Games Workshop brings in > 0.5 billion in revenue (!!), compared to all of UKs fisheries at 1 billion-ish (profit margins are, as you'd expect, pretty favorable for the plastic figurines that they don' even paint for you).

Thanks for this interesting fact.

> Games Workshop brings in > 0.5 billion in revenue (!!)

I had no idea that Warhammer was such a huge industry - they must sell almost 600 sets a quarter.

This is either a joke that flies over my head or there are a few zeroes missing. Which is it?

It's priced in a similar way to Lego.

I don't find Lego especially expensive. And Lego is way more difficult to manufacture, has very exacting functional requirements and extremely good QA.

I bought a Warhammer set during Covid and was amazed at the detail, compared to the 1990s stuff I had as a kid.

I can't say what's more difficult to manufacture - millions of identical bricks that snap together, or a huge range of different, detailed designs which fit snugly together but don't lock.

Just the first thing on the home page: https://www.warhammer.com/en-GB/shop/Deathlords-Mortarchs-Ma...

> millions of identical bricks

Clearly you are not aware of the extraordinary range of Lego pieces.

Proportionate to the size of each company and the amount of toys they produce, I'll bet there's significantly more variety in Warhammer.

Just from a quick search, within a year Games Workshop offer about 3000 different model kits, each of which will contain ~1-4 unique moulded sprues. There seem to be at least 50 new kits each year, possibly 100, otherwise what's available rotates around the older kits.

Lego have produced about 15,000 different sets since 1950, and a huge number of the parts are shared between sets. (That's the whole point of the toy, no?)

Yeah I tried to look up the number of different Lego partszbut it gets hard to define what a Lego part is. And are we counting different colours, different designs printed on them, etc. Somewhere between 5k and 60k.