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America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

(www.molsonhart.com)
842 points putzdown | 9 comments | 15 Apr 25 13:50 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source | bottom
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NoTeslaThrow ◴[16 Apr 25 15:02 UTC] No.43706451[source]▶
We never stopped manufacturing, we just stopped employing people.

> We don’t have the infrastructure to manufacture

That's trivially false given we're the second-largest manufacturer in the world. We just don't want to employ people, hence why we can't make an iphone or refine raw materials.

The actual issue is that our business culture is antithetical to a healthy society. The idea of employing Americans is anti-business—there's no willingness to invest, or to train, or to support an employee seen as waste. Until business can find some sort of reason to care about the state of the country, this will continue.

Of course, the government could weigh in, could incentivize, could subsidize, could propagandize, etc, to encourage us to actually build domestic industries. But that would be a titantic course reversal that would take decades of cultural change.

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glitchc ◴[16 Apr 25 15:09 UTC] No.43706516[source]▶
Concur, employee training and retention are at an all-time low. There are no positions available for junior employees, minimal onboarding and mentoring of new employees. Organizations have stopped planning people's careers. Used to be that the employee's career growth was their manager's problem, while the employee could focus on the work. Now the employee must market themselves as often, if not more often, than actually doing the work. Meanwhile organizations see employees as cost centres and a net drain on their revenue sources.

Corporate culture in America is definitely broken. I'm not sure how we can fix it.

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giancarlostoro ◴[16 Apr 25 17:02 UTC] No.43707734[source]▶
> minimal onboarding and mentoring of new employees. Organizations have stopped planning people's careers.

I hear from all the much more senior devs about how they learned OOP in company training after years of C, or how their employers would give bonuses for finished projects, and that sort of thing. I always seem to join the ship when the money train and training train leaves the boat.

I think R&D for tax reasons needs to be changed, we had so many tech advancements used to this day from Bell Labs. Now only Microsoft, Google, Apple etc can afford to do R&D and so all the innovation is essentially only worth while to them if they can profit from it.

Granted I do think if you build something innovative you should be able to monetize it, but it takes investing a lot of blood, sweat, tears and money.

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InDubioProRubio ◴[17 Apr 25 09:03 UTC] No.43714486[source]▶
But then the ip-poachers wait for you at the gates. Investing into the new thing, in a world order where copying the new thing is the best game approach, makes R&D a looser strategy. You need temporary punishment tariffs on products that steal IPs to recuperate the investments and make it a bad strategy - or else..

Patents do not work - because the rule of law does not exists without the international order and goverments have a tendency to trade away such cases for protection of big players.

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1. ta20240528 ◴[17 Apr 25 09:45 UTC] No.43714714[source]▶
Literally patents.

But you have to take out a copy of the patent in EVERY country you want protection. Most companies don't do this and then whine about copies.

And lest someone whose never done it says they don't work: note how diligently generic drug companies wait for patents to expire.

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2. nickff ◴[17 Apr 25 16:43 UTC] No.43719294[source]▶
What you’re describing is monstrously expensive, and doesn’t actually prevent IP violations, it just allows you to recover some of your losses, which is also expensive, and is unrealistic if the violators are fly-by-night operations.
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3. aleph_minus_one ◴[17 Apr 25 21:28 UTC] No.43722426[source]▶
> What you’re describing is monstrously expensive

I would actually consider this to be an desirable side effect: if you want governments to enforce your monopoly using their state authority, you better pay for this really well. :-)

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4. leereeves ◴[17 Apr 25 23:24 UTC] No.43723311{3}[source]▶
So you'd prefer there be no protection for inventors who aren't already wealthy?
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5. aleph_minus_one ◴[18 Apr 25 01:44 UTC] No.43724120{4}[source]▶
I prefer for inventors not having to deal with the minefield of loads of existing patents.
6. ta20240528 ◴[18 Apr 25 10:32 UTC] No.43726696[source]▶
1) The alternative is for millions of local-currency patents in Lesotho to automatically be valid for two decades in USA, EU, and Japan.

2) An of course it doesn't prevent IP violations - Eurocopter (now Airbus helicopters) had to spend millions to enforce their patents against the thieves* at Bell helicopter.

https://www.bananaip.com/intellepedia/bell-helicopter-v-euro...

* not my preferred choice of words, but its the tone on this forum.

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7. vel0city ◴[18 Apr 25 18:36 UTC] No.43730718{3}[source]▶
I'm confused by the ending of this article. It seems like two mutually exclusive outcomes happened.

> The court held that the landing gear certified and sold by Bell Helicopter on its Model 429 helicopter, namely the Production Gear, does not infringe the Eurocopter patent. The court invalidated all but one claim of Eurocopter’s patent. Bell Helicopter is, therefore, free to continue all use and sales of its Model 429 helicopter with its existing landing gear.

So it doesn't infringe and they can continue to use the landing gear. But then

> In addition to awarding to Eurocopter damages and punitive damages, the judge also issued an injunction enjoining Bell from manufacturing, using, or selling the infringing landing gear, and also ordered Bell to destroy all infringing landing gears in its possession.

What? I'm clearly missing something here.

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8. pm3003 ◴[26 Apr 25 11:29 UTC] No.43802666{4}[source]▶
The first gear that Bell made was clearly a copy of Eurocopter's, though they claimed otherwise, and because of this they couldn't / didn't want to move on with certification and production. A lot of this can be considered as not being patent infrigement (development and experimentation, prior art claims...).

They slightly modified the gear on the production models. Eurocopter claimed the slightly modified gear is essentially the same (likely true) and thus still infringes on the patent (the court ruled otherwise).

The judge said the new modified gear is okay but ordered the old ones to be destroyed.

A Pyrrhic tactical victory for Eurocopter (kept their patent at great cost) and a strategic defeat (as Bell is essentially still selling their tech).

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9. InDubioProRubio ◴[29 Apr 25 10:26 UTC] No.43830733{5}[source]▶
And it will come back to hunt bell, as there ip can no be invalidated in europe and get a tactical defeat in the tit for tat that the ip-laws have decayed into.