'We Currently Have No Container Ships,' Seattle Port Says

I really hope that capitalism works this time: we bring back our key manufacturing. One may argue that toys are not key manufacturing, but I think that argument misses the point. The point is, a truly industrialized country can produce anything en mass, if needed. Without light industry, we simply can't achieve that. Worse, we become the Soviet Union, letting heavy industry break the country's back. The recent India-Pkistan conflict is a good example.

During the India-Pakistan conflict on May 7, 2025, Pakistan claimed that it used a J-10C fighter jet to shoot down an Indian Rafale jet. The possible reasons below for the Rafale being shot down are quite a read. I listed some below. And I'm not sure how many people realized this: each J-10 sold for only 50M, while each Rafale sold for north of 200M. And when a dark factory in China churns out a thousand PL-15s a day like the US used to be able to do, how do we even fight that if there is indeed a war?

All the technologies list below used to be the envy of China, yet now China can make them. They may not as good as the western, but good enough with cheap enough will win, right?

What's even more sad is that we seemed content that we can export lots of agriculture products and raw materials to China. I thought that used to be what a colony did: Britains mandated that colonies couldn't produce advanced products and could only export raw materials. And our founding fathers fought a war so we didn't have to be a colonized country. Well, history is full of irony.

Now some technical stuff about J-10 vs Rafale:

Radar Performance Gap: The J-10C is equipped with the KLJ-7A active electronically scanned array (AESA) radar, which uses gallium nitride (GaN) technology and includes over 1,200 T/R modules. It can detect a 5 m² target at a range of up to 220 km. In contrast, the Rafale’s RBE2-AA radar uses only 836 gallium arsenide (GaAs) modules, with a detection range of about 150 km and weaker resistance to jamming. This allows the J-10C to lock onto the Rafale first, putting the Indian aircraft at a disadvantage.

Missile Range Advantage: The J-10C can carry the PL-15 ultra-long-range air-to-air missile, with a range exceeding 200 km, enabling it to engage targets from a distance. The Rafale is armed with MICA air-to-air missiles, which have a range of less than 100 km. Even when fitted with Meteor missiles, the range is only about 150 km, clearly inferior in comparison.

Electronic Warfare Capability Gap: The J-10C can carry advanced electronic warfare pods such as the RKL-700A, which can disrupt the Rafale's radar and communication systems. Moreover, the J-10C operates in coordination with the ZDK-03 early warning aircraft, which can penetrate cloud cover to locate targets and transmit encrypted coordinates to the J-10C via a jam-resistant data link, enabling a “silent kill.” On the other hand, the Indian Rafale, due to its diverse sourcing and poor data link compatibility, is at a disadvantage in electronic warfare.

The US is the world's second biggest manufacturing country, almost on par with China. We have lots of manufacturing -- we just rely on automation instead of people.

China has something like 20x the number of people working in manufacturing. They also have a deep local supply chain.

Putting those things together, they can efficiently handle smaller orders or bespoke things.

This whole situation is stupid.

It’s this simple: in the 1950s and 1960s you could graduate high school, get a job, and raise a family, often with home ownership as part of the equation. You also had more job security, at least for a while.

This past isn’t just glorified by MAGA. You also see it glorified by the Sanders/AOC wing of the Democrats at times.

Unfortunately neither side’s solutions will get us back there.

To get back there we’d have to attack the problem from two ends.

We would have to raise minimum wage, offer more assistance for health care or even full single payer, and to make the minimum wage increase work we probably would have to do a little of the tariffing and border enforcement MAGA likes… but not as much, and with better strategy.

But we would also have to implode the housing market. We’d have to MHCA (Make Housing Cheap Again). Real estate cost is one of the major reasons you can’t live like this anymore. Real estate cannot simultaneously be affordable and a good investment. We have opted in the past 50 years to protect the latter. We would have to switch and go for the former, which would destroy home equity.

It would cause problems. See, part of what we have done with housing is turn it into a stealth shadow second social security system for the middle class and the wealthy. Once you get on the housing treadmill your later life and retirement is subsidized by real estate appreciation. It’s a regressive tax, both economically and age wise as it’s essentially a tax on the young trying to get started.

But killing that system to make housing affordable would suddenly leave a ton of elderly people with no savings. The government would have to step in here too.

… which would mean both tax increases and spending cuts, and neither is popular.

Simply tariffing like mad and kicking out immigrant competition for labor won’t work because it won’t fix the cost disease.

Let’s assume all of this is done in good faith (which is debatable) and genuine love to bring manufacturing back to America. If you were in charge, how would you do it? What is the long term plan here? Even with massive capital, it is near impossible to set up factories and train workers overnight or even in a few months.

Are there any incentives to make household items here? How is it possible to compete in price with the Chinese factories? If the plan is to use 100% automation and robots, that defeats the purpose of creating jobs, right? I genuinely don’t understand this whole thing.

> The US is the world's second biggest manufacturing country, almost on par with China. We have lots of manufacturing -- we just rely on automation instead of people.

On overall market cap, yes. What I'm not sure about are the numbers in key industries. For instance, we rely on China on key pharmaceutical ingredients. Heck, we were even in a crisis of shortage of salient solutions when there was a supply crunch from China. China manufactured more than 90% of the ships in the world. China manufactured many types of low-end chips we use in power supplies, in cars, and etc. The cost of our custom components on airplanes and battleships have been increasing through the roof because we simply can't rely on civil factories to make them cheaply. The list can go on.

> If you were in charge, how would you do it

TBH I'm not sure. My charitable interpretation is that the US government said they would try but never did, or at least not successfully. At least Trump's government is willing to try in broad daylight, and Vance explicitly called out that it is a pipe dream that a nation could enjoying drawing boxes in air-conditioned offices and hope that we have technology superiority forever, as innovation only came from doing. So, I'm willing to give them benefit of doubt and wait for months if not years to see how things pan out.

> Are there any incentives to make household items here?

My naive view is price is the incentive. True capitalism means when price is too high to have space to arbitrage, the investment will pour in or the bootlegging will proper. I hope it's the former.

> If the plan is to use 100% automation and robots, that defeats the purpose of creating jobs, right?

My optimistic view is that we would create a lot more jobs in different categories if we can achieve certain level of automation.

P.S., super successful people like Balaji basically said that it's hopeless now. The western world can't bring manufacturing back because we don't have talent or know-how or great workforce any more. That saddens me greatly. China didn't have talent or know-how or great workforce 20 or 25 years ago. If we read the newspaper then, we would see everywhere that western talent and professionalism were the envy of the entire nation. Most people thought owning a car was a pipe dream, let alone making their own AEW or 5th-gen fighter jet. It was Japanese, Taiwanese, Americans, and Europeans who brought investment and know-how to China to boostrap the great nation. Yet now we throw the towel and thhink we can't rebuild out talent? Our fate is becoming a neo-colony?

Those easy times of the 50s were created from the pains of the 30s and 40s. 25% were unemployed in the early 30s.

If you wanted to go back you would have to kick women and minories out of the workforce so a man could earn double and have a percentage of young able bodied men killed or broken a generation before (through a war) before to get that demand where a highschool dropout who becomes a mailman can buy a house for a few thousand dollars.

Existing built home prices are going to go up in value if your society growing expanding. If you want declining home prices you need to reduce people/demand. The problem today is everyone wants to live in the biggest cities mostly because of jobs and everyone wants to setup a business because greater selection of employees. If the work from home movement succeeds this can break one of the pillars of why people need to be in big cities and cheaper houses can be built elsewhere.

If if we do increasing manufacturing, you can be sure it won't increase manufacturing _jobs_.

Meanwhile lots of jobs will be lost due to reduced trade (as per the article).

So even in the "best case scenario", this does not work out well for the average American.

> Those easy times of the 50s were created from the pains of the 30s and 40s.

Actually it was mostly created by the huge post-WW2 boom due to the fact that the US was quite literally the only country left standing, the only country not devastated by war, and the holder of much of the world's wealth in the form of gold reserves (collecting much of the gold that Europe had in store--you thought we did it for free?)

It's not clear how gold owned by the US's central bank (the Federal Reserve) translates into prosperity for the average US citizen.

Existing built home prices will go up if construction doesn’t keep up with demand, which has been the case for some time. Why is housing exempt from normal supply and demand?

We do not have to ruin the world or kick women out of the work force. What we need is the same kind of price deflation that happened for appliances and manufactured goods to happen with housing. Of course the finite land supply probably makes price reductions that extreme unachievable but we could certainly make prices a lot more reasonable by density and taking the brakes off building.

It would also create a bunch of construction jobs.

Not these days, but back then it did because the US dollar was backed by gold, so more gold meant the Fed could increase the money supply without devaluing the currency (==inflation).

It's fine if the US wanted to encourage onshoring of certain key industries for national security reasons.

You do that through strategic investment. Silicon Valley is where it is because of government investment here.

You don't do it through sudden high tariffs and angering our other allies. You don't need to be an economist to know it's a terrible idea.

You only need to know how tariffs work to understand it's an insanely stupid idea that'll crash our economy and put American businesses into bankruptcy.

> Why is housing exempt from normal supply and demand?

Most people feel the need to live in a house, so the demand is not going to diminish when the supply is low. Also, the land that housing requires is a fixed size resource, so is often seen as a good investment which means that over-supply of housing usually results in it being purchased by the wealthy and then used to generate rent income from the less wealthy.

> a dark factory in China

why is it a dark factory? power shortage?

more likely a reference to "lights-out" manufacturing where you have automated a factory to the extent you don't have to provide lighting or HVAC as there are no humans needed in the production area. The robots don't need to see.