'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.

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.

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.