Electronics mainly. The battlefield of today and tomorrow are largely in the cyber realm. The ability and need to manufacture systems without Chinese fingerprints is becoming increasingly important. But there's also things like additive manufacturing and the resurgence in American rocket technology with Space-X, Blue Origin, and Aerojet Rocketdyne to move away from Russian engines.
No, I meant what I said. Zehr likes to pipe in with a "sounds about right" sort of affirmation and bring nothing himself, or make an assumption impinging on me personally that is often proved demonstrably false. I get it, you have your boys. And it is fair that maybe he just agrees perfectly with everything said. It's perfectly valid for me to respond in the same spirit in which he remarked I wouldn't have a response for BPV. My arguments are fine, many people here just disagree. Hell, if you haven't noticed, the substance of what I have said seems to be more popular than your notion that trade deficits are a serious problem. Yet you see me as peeing in your red ball cap just for the hell of it and have nothing to say to the others here. Maybe this is just a sore spot for you.
Think of it this way, if we were to ever go to war against China, what would we have to produce or get an alternate supply for? Low costs has caused us to put over half our eggs in one basket. It has also opened up a colossal attack vector for stealing IP, trade secrets, and national security secrets.
And much of the manufacturing is dependent on rare earth metals for which china has cornered the supply.
We could mine many of those metals here (we used to), but its an extremely dirty and messy job. We let China do it so its out of sight and out of mind.
there's a difference between high skilled and high tech and pure grunt work. even our grunt people make twice what people in china do. it just isn't efficient to make stuff like that here. those unskilled people are better off working for walmart or costco than making toasters.
why are we going to war with china? and why can't we get it from indonesia, mexico, india, etc etc etc. china is hardly the only low wage supplier worldwide.
I said if. Unless you live under a rock, you know that China and the US aren't exactly BFFs, we are potential adversaries. Especially when it comes to electronics, its impossible to build a piece of silicon that does not involve China within the supply chain.
it's pretty improbable we go to war with china though. no upside for either country. i agree with you about the chips, but i dont' think a short term supply gap would be huge personally.
What would you call stealing IP and trade secrets at an estimated cost of $100bn/year in revenue. We're not shooting each other, but they're delivering the hardware and components with the built in back doors to gain access. It doesn't matter where a product is assembled if the all the legos are coming from China. A supply gap puts a yuge anchor on our entire economy, it'd take a minimum of 1-2 years to set up the industrial base just to start working on the backlog.
I think automation will continue to bring those capabilities back. The problem is the complete lack of diversification, if it was spread over all of SE Asia it wouldn't be nearly as big of a deal.
