This is why I want to see micro-fabrication become ubiquitous. I believe a massive economic revolution that vastly improves our world is possible. I think this is a world where smaller manufacturers can compete with giant foundries, but it depends on
1) automation of small-scale raw-resource production (mining, plant materials, or even better yet, recycling for raw resources.)
2) a massive investment in micro-fabricator processes (not just 3-d printing, but modular and high-quality output of formed metals, textiles and even electronics that doesn't require hours of mucking with calibration.)
3) Replacing business-to-business-only networks with a blurred business-to-business-or-consumer one, where locally produced materials can be just-in-time committed, produced and shipped to either customers, small, in-situ manufacturers or repairmen, or even another manufacturer for advanced finishing of intermediate goods.
The process of mining, to ore, to refining to sponge to billet or extrusion is not something you are going to do in your garage.
If we JUST look at aluminum… it’s mined in places like Australia, Chinese companies then ship it to Iceland for refining on tankers because of cheap electricity, then back across the world to china where it made into powder/sponge at basically one Chinese city, where then it may be turned into billet, shipped across ocean again to USA maybe through Panama to the east coast where a company gets it in, then CNC machines it into some low tier product that is destined for a landfill but markets it as a made in USA widget.
Between the fact that this metal was handled and shipped across the world two or three times… the regulation and necessarily environmentally dirty processes are just not happening in the USA. We have regulated ourselves into the most unearned environmentally “conscious” position.
The fact that we have people controlling narrative about climate change and they aren’t pushing to deregulate in order to move production away from China is all anyone with experience in manufacturing needs to know on this “debate”.
You let me know when “Greta” Co is pushing to make the world less reliant on China in order to not just mask the environmental costs of production.
Your comment is the best and most realistic one on this thread.
There's so many people on this website sitting behind Chinese made computers spitting bullshit on "well if we could just get those container ships to pull some solar panels to then grow corn onboard and create a micro climate and process ethanol for said ship, then this whole process would be negligible and carbon neutral and not matter." Give me a fucking break. The world economy is based on exploitation and consumption. There is no "carbon neutral" consumption. There is no getting rich on a USA 1800s type agrarian low human footprint economy.
Like your correct comment indicates, the fact is the global economy is logistically insanely complex, politically complex, and mostly exists for pure consumption and waste. The Greta's are making "moral" arguments and brain washing the first world in order to ship production of "dirty" industries to china, LATAM, and Russia. They are wall streets biggest lobbyists!
I have 20 years experience actually making things. I have seen the UAW in Detroit, I’ve worked in education and tech… I’ve seen how the sausage is made, so it is infuriating when HN-types, or progressives, or anyone really start on about “well, what we need to do is” if they have never actually made a thing in their lives… well; I guess I value the “I’m just talking to talk” flag… and what an amazing coincide “the solution” is to tax me more! Everytime, what are the odds!? :)
I know fuck all, but maybe what you know is to do things a certain way.
I'm guessing you could have worked at any car manufacturer 15 years ago and would have said electrical cars are a fantasy. Yet someone came along and disrupted your entire world.
Electric cars aren’t ready for anything but around town. Which they are great at. I’m looking at 2030 model plans - and spoiler alert - they’re gas and diesel. Although I can tell you particulate filters are coming for pertol, that is the next big change, but other than that until you change physics or make drastically better batteries, gas cars aren’t going anywhere
Just because the morons in your home country are buying shit mobiles to drive 1 km a day to and from work (or whatever stupid units you use) is not an indicator for the world at large. 2030 is gas and diesel cars! Just like how 80% of our power is still going to be hydrocarbons in 2030. Read all the fantasy you want; physics and thermodynamics do not change. If the world does not split atoms in a large scale we will burn coal or natural gas.
My comments along with SV's comments is how ignorant most people are to how things are made and done, because the majority of the folks on sites like this type code for a living and argue things for arguments sake, and don't actually make real, tangible things.
More gas than coal over here, but we’re close to 50% renewable energy and growing fast. I use an exclusively solar/wind provider, and with a set of solar panels I could easily generate enough power for 10.000km/year charging at home. You might need to revise some of your concepts.
Just to keep things real and your eye on the ball, there's a caveat (well, several) to the statistic you've quoted and linked.
That's "close to" 50% renewables in some regions toward replacing current electricity generation.
If all vehicles stopped using petrol | diesal tomorrow and automagically becam electric the demand for electricity would increase dramatically and renewable contributions as a percentage would dwindle.
It's good work so far but there's still a long way to go, much to do, and a few billion tonnes of mining to churn through just to provide resources for your goal.
Ricardobeat is sipping the kool aid. First, just because an energy source has a name plate capacity of x does not mean it generates x. Typically, wind and solar generate 10% of their nameplate value (while fossil fuels generate 100%)! Also, there has to be a baseline power source on the grid (which is fossils fuels, using gas from Russia in your part of the world)!
While I’m sure you think that is a gotcha… Alumina is not the same as Aluminum, but I count them as the same thing for the purpose of creating aluninum. Clearly not everyone does.
Find a chart that shows Russia making more alumina that anyone, you won’t find it. Best case, you’ll find Iceland making it, but the unwritten subtext will be Chinese factories and loaded on to Chinese ships.
Not with that attitude. These things move a bit at a time, as factories are built or upgraded and even then only in response to legal obligations or sales pitches. The state of the art in research is basically always ahead of what can be bought, and what can be bought is always ahead of the median that has already been built.
> But the flip side of this story is one of risk. Each of these companies represents an important micro pinch point in the global economy. If we are now living through a new Cold War, and if that Cold War begins to affect global trade (this might already be happening) then
He missed an even more important point. That is, globalization's foundation is ultra-inexpensive shipping of raw goods, parts, and then finished product.
Long to short, globalization is dependent on the status quo fuel. That is oil. Lots of cheap oil. So the risk isn't simply from the bottlenecks and lack of economic diversity. It that globalization perpetuates a status quo that favors climate change.
The cost of shipping overseas at scale (thanks to containerization, automated ports and gigantic ships) is lower than doing so locally with less efficient means (i.e. your chicken farmer's diesel van). Given that, even if the price of oil goes up, the math doesn't change because costs rise uniformly.
I should clarify a bit...it's not so much about international ship vs local truck. It's that the foundation of the global economic system is "tuned" to being pro climate change, if you will. When so much is riding (literally) on the status quo, getting a ship that large (metaphorically) to adjust direction is difficult.
I don't get it. Instead of a truck driving 100 miles from the factory to the store, you now have ships driving thousands of miles halfway across the world to a port, where a truck then picks up the product and drives 100 miles to the store.
Yes but you’re ignoring how much each carries. If you look at amount carried per amount of fuel consumed per journey, container ships are much more efficient than trucks regardless that one journey is 100 miles and the other is 3000.
A further irony on this is that the main reason those goods are so cheap is because they tend to be produced in areas that not only have cheaper labor, but also far fewer environmental and other regulations. So we're intentionally outsourcing in pursuit of less environmentally friendly production (because it's cheaper), and then shipping it half way around the world on top. Globalism is most certainly not environmentally friendly in any way, shape, or fashion.
Thank you. I should have mentioned that as well. People think it's all about cost of labor in China and SE Asia. But it's also a lack of regulation that protects the ecology.
The USA loves to brag about how bad it was in the 70s - remember the TV adverts with the Native American and a tear in his eye? - and how well we cleaned up our act. Lol. Ohhellno. When we offshored the manufacturing, the associated pollution when with it. We didn't clean up as much as we outsourced our pollution.
Point being, when we see the photos of Beijing and the smog, that's not China's smog, we, and the rest of The West "owns" a good chunk of that smog. But the politicians and the corporate leaders aren't going to be transparent about it.
Ah gotcha I misunderstood. Are you then suggesting that everything everyone needs to consume and dependent supply chains be provided within close proximity of every individual consumer then?
At a time when there was a dip in container shipping, I read a quote stating ~$1500 to ship a container from China to US (west coast, probably). With such a container holding ~6000 pair of shoes.
Do the math... Of course shipping costs may have changed, but parents' point stands:
The energy consumption (and labour costs) embodied in many products' fabrication, is much higher than energy consumed to ship 'em around the world. And thus those products will be fabricated where it's cheapest and/or most efficient.
If the promises of small modular nuclear reactors comes to pass[0], we can have hydrocarbon-free shipping without much difficulty.
Even without that, there are solutions.
[0] I'm not holding my breath but I'll be happy if it does work out. IMO the biggest problem isn't even making them work, it's making them safe against deliberate tampering by highly motivated people with a lot of time on their hands.
Not a chance. Shipping is taking a global mix of low cost workers and then as cheaply as possible getting goods from A to B.
The margins are razor thin, generally negative with boom years in between.
A 400m containership is operated with a crew of 16 + whatever maintenance technicians are on board. How du you feel about leaving a single low paid person in charge of the reactor on a 6 hours on and 6 hours off schedule?
The long distance shipping industry is looking at methanol, ammonia and hydrogen to decarbonize.
> How du you feel about leaving a single low paid person in charge of the reactor on a 6 hours on and 6 hours off schedule?
The way small modular reactors are advertised, that's not the risk I'm worried about.
Instead, I'd ask: what can Hamas/North Korea/literal pirates do if they boarded the vessel half way between ports, and are actively trying to cause problems.
Yes, GP here. I'm also talking about the fact that the very foundation of the globalization economy is based on fossil fuels. That belief (?) is going to influence decisions literally from the bottom up. As long as that foundation is printing money - and it is - it's going to influence all that sits on too of it.
You have to consider percentage of emission vs percentage of the goods moved. I believe shipping is way more favorable in the regard vs it being replace by local shipping by millions of trucks.
Shipping is cheap these days because volume is up, and because losses due to theft (thanks to containerization) and piracy (thanks to Team America World Police) are down.
I wonder how much this changes as American priorities change. It seems as the population ages and entitlement spending as a proportion of GDP grows, there’s less tolerance for expensive world policing.
Well ok sure, but how do we manage specialized inputs for the production of the global economies goods and services in an efficient manner without gloabalization? Everyone growing up thinks they are going to be a "doctor" or a "lawyer" or a programmer or a professor or whatever, some very large sector of labor that requires very little specialized inputs: but in fact, the vast majority of people become involved in labor that intersects with the global economy in ways they only understand in a small way. That is the nature of our modern economy, why capitalism is so robust is precisely because it has somehow managed to efficiently distribute labor such that all these various processes whose complexity is dizzying in nature are able to work like grand clockwork.
If an alternative form of economic planning does not come about, since Global Capitalism introduces so many externalities it will destroy itself relatively quickly. Such self-destruction seems inevitable at this point, but we are not given real alternatives: Communism is a spectre, it haunts discourse since it exists as the only alternative posited that seeks to increase productivity and global wealth. Others are simply regressive, right-wing policies that emphasize a return to communal life (whose advocates forget, or perhaps are simply unfamiliar with, the extraordinary poverty of traditional rural communities).
And yet not once has communism been shown to out-compete capitalism in terms of wealth generation and the destruction of poverty. Capitalism has been adapted so severely to social concerns that it is difficult to tell (especially in China, which still calls itself communist) where the social policies end and the wealth generation begins. Though it is not and cannot be the end of history. But then how could our future be anything but at the same time both fantastically wealthy and horrifically dystopic? Out of that extreme chaos, what could come but more chaos, more terror, more luxury and more suffering. Magnitudes of pleasure and displeasure vacillation, desire inversion, operational schizophrenia, than we could even comprehend today. The alternative is already a lack of an alternative.
The collapse of this network is a very real scenario for the collapse of civilization.
When the power plant can't get a spare part, because the shipping truck can't get gas, because the pump in the gas station doesn't have electricity. - and on and on.
The entire infrastructure of the world is intertwined.
During the last two years I was on projects where one single part could no longer be sourced, and it held up millions of dollars of other inputs. It doesn't take everything collapsing, it only takes just enough.
The book “lights out” gives an eye-opening look at this in terms of the electrical grid. Apparently, there are many transformers that can only be manufactured by a couple overseas manufacturers, sometimes with 18+ month lead times. And some of the infrastructure needed to deliver these parts (e.g., railways) don’t even exist anymore.
The ability to improvise or produce locally (and in limited quantities) is not as poor as often made out (in particular because you throw away the rule book).
Doesn't mean some specific things would not be difficult to get.
Also, even in wars with heavy and broad destruction there wasn't a collapse of civilization.
> even in wars with heavy and broad destruction there wasn't a collapse of civilization
This is something that has puzzled me before. Like when I'm reading about the destruction in Ukraine, the active targeting of their electrical grid by Russian airstrikes, in juxtaposition with stories and photos in which it seems that day-to-day life for much of Ukraine is much closer to "normal" than "collapse of civilization."
To be clear, I don't mean to downplay what has happened there, or suggest that everything is fine. I'm just surprised by the apparent robustness of the infrastructure, civilization, etc.
I mean, even if the Russians aren't aiming for that, many people make it sound like modern electrical grids and supply chains in developed nations are always teetering on the edge of collapse, so it shouldn't take much to push them over that edge.
It's a war, that is the driver? Is that the question? Why in a war would you want to hurt the opponent?
Collapsing the opponents power grid is a way to reduce the opponents ability to respond, to subdue them. Then once subdued and occupied, then re-build it.
I think you would find there is always a balancing act in 'how much to destroy' in order to win, and also limit 'how hard will it be to rebuild once we've won'. But collapse is always part of it, because you are trying to win by hurting the other country.
ah. Ok.
Maybe to sway opinion, if you can lay the blame on the other side and gain sympathy.
or when retreating. But this seems pretty drastic in modern war. Not like you are burning wood forts behind you as you retreat.
Yes, there is a sliding scale of complexity and capital costs on products that could be rapidly switched to local production. -> Hence the move to bring semi-conductors back to home soil. Because if there was a collapse of some kind, these would be very difficult to ramp up from scratch during a crisis. So you have to have some infrastructure already in place, some minimum.
That makes energy innovation the most critical of our lifetime. Without the small manufacturers doing niche products worldwide everyone becomes much poorer on goods and services they need. That hits poorer countries the worst and triggers more war as people find fewer means of getting out of poverty (Putin was able to motivate Russians from far regions that thought washing machines were worth plundering and sending back.)
Globalisation keeps the world at peace - as long as world leaders see the scales of the choice between maintaining trade and starting a war tilted toward trade, the world is a better place. Fossil fuels for transport and coal burning in China likely contributes the most massive amounts to global pollution. Thus innovation in nuclear would be massive, and improvements in battery storage would increase the utility of seasonal renewables as well as electric transport.
Humans are benevolent when they are fed, warm, and secure. The most important effective innovation keeps humans from getting on each other’s throats.
> Globalisation keeps the world at peace - as long as world leaders see the scales of the choice between maintaining trade and starting a war tilted toward trade, the world is a better place.
Kinda. It also means certain in-countries can do whatever they want to certain out-countries.
Can’t China start a new Cold War pretty easily? Any other country China sanctions, even the US, would be crippled. China would suffer retaliatory sanctions too of course, but it seems like they’d be able to weather such a storm much easier than anyone else. Or is this too simplified?
Our lives in the US would be significantly worse if China did not exist, and if trade between our countries were cut off we would lose manufactured goods, machinery, and textiles. China on the other hand would lose food, ores and minerals, and fuel. More importantly for China, without the trade income from the US it would struggle to maintain import levels of all products including food from the rest of the world.
In November of 2022 Chinese leaders found the limit of their control over Chinese people, and were so worried about rebellions that they precipitously dismantled almost all covid protections. Data suggest this killed 2 million people after China had previously exhibited among the lowest covid fatality rates in the world.
The internal politics related to China’s recent economic decline remain very muted, for now. One of the causes of this slowdown is the increased focus on geopolitical competition at the expense of economic relationships with the rest of the world. At some point, further economic decline that also results in food shortages, would seriously test its internal political stability.
A rapid decline in quality of life would challenge the US political system, too, especially with democracy in the US looking less resilient than it did 20 years ago, but food security would be much less of an issue.
Data in China goes through heavy censorship. It is naive to use, and analyse any of their data, as it represents what the government wants the reality to be.
The official death count is barely above 100,000. No one uses those data, and that is not the source of the 2 million figure.
We largely understand the failures that killed a million people in the US; China was not confronted with the same issue that would have resulted in well over 4 million deaths there.
I think this paragraph from the OP addresses that pretty well:
> One obvious takeaway from the paper: whoa, America is far more reliant on China than it thought. But actually this underplays the complexity. Think back to our Brandauer electrode. The chances are that it was made of metals which were originally refined in China (I’m guessing here, but given China is the world’s biggest metal refiner this is not implausible). Those metals were then shipped to the UK where they were turned into the micron-accurate electrodes I saw being turned out of the machines in Birmingham. Then they were shipped back to another factory, probably in China, where they were put inside a rear view mirror.
Now I'm not saying China's not capable of manufacturing that electrode, probably of the 45% not made by Brandauer some or all are from China anyway, but the point is it shows the kind of disruption it would cause to any country. Some like China less than others like the UK, sure, but still disruption. Globalisation isn't quite 'we all get everything from China now'.
They have the economic ability to do so but China also imports a lot of critical things, such as clean water and animal feed, that it doesn't really have the capacity for at home.
There's a lot of tit-for-tat actions that the US (or the global West, for that matter) could take that would cripple China socially. A bunch of starving, young, educated men with no job prospects and no family prospects is the CCP's nightmare scenario. That sort of thing generally leads to revolutions.
The problem is that both actors have some serious leverage, and either side using that leverage in a serious, combative manner would harm the both the aggressor and the recipient. Nobody wants that.
No. Some of those geopolitics folks believe they're kind of screwed population-wise as China has mostly focused on low-value manufacturing which requires a LOT of workers, but due to various policies like one-child, they have a population that is rapidly aging and retiring. One of the CCP's lead data scientists said something to the tune that they over-counted by 100M young people. Also, Chinese labor is no longer cheap...Mexico and many other Asian and African countries are now more affordable.
America is slowly entering an era of reshoring our factories to control low value manufacturing and high value products.
Shucks, I would have gotten away with it too if it weren't for you meddling kids.
Just kidding. But yeah I think Zeihan is one of the most outspoken on the issue. I've seen a few others as well and assume it isn't just groupthink coming from Zeihan. As a counter example to his points about China not having any high value would be a recent PBS Nova episode on China's tech sector that goes over some success stories like Huawei. Nobody can tell the future, so take what I said further above with a grain of salt. I think the demographics angle is pretty important though as well as China's need to import food due to bad geography that requires a large and fairly manual workforce that no longer exists after urbanization. Interesting stuff.
Trade is a relatively low percentage of gdp for the USA, which I imagine would make it more resilient to a trade war than China. See link below: ratios of 25% and 38%, resp.
Values matter much less than what's imported. For a simple example, imagine a country chose to restrict another country's access to luxury technology, clothes, and vehicles. And the other country chose to respond by restricting the former country's access to food, fertilizer, and gas. It's not hard to see who's going to win this trade war, even though the luxury goods almost certainly have a far higher nominal $ value.
GDP, and especially fraction of GDP is a useless metrics. Food is 2% of GDP, energy barely more, I guarantee that if that fraction becomes 0, you won't loose 2% of your economy.
Ok, USA trade isn’t vital you say (disagree, but let’s go with it). The USA is has outsourced aluminum, steel, a lot of composite production. Even if you wanted to spool more up, we lack the ability to make chips, we lack the rare earth metals that China took world control over.
Even if USA isn’t massively dependent on paper - the practical effects of that 25/38% makes 100% of our capability happen.
Australia lost billions in exports. We were treated to the site of ships fully laden with Australian coal queued outside Chinese ports with nowhere to go, and reports of Chinese provinces literally freezing in the dark. It was caused by mind boggingly godsackingly daft behaviour from politicians at the highest levels in both countries. And, surprise surprise, none of it would have happened without a some help from Trump.
Three years and a change of Australian government later, and the restrictions are being lifted. It hurt at the time. Some exports like wine and lobsters never did find alternate markets, but most did, and notably Australia didn't suffer a recession after losing it's largest trading partner without warning.
I presume China found alternate sources of most things. It would be a higher price of course, just as Australia was forced to accept lower prices. Unsurprisingly both countries look to be very keen to renew normal relations.
In fact they mostly have. But very little has changed trade wise because each country has now signed trade agreements that bind them for a year of two, which I guess is testimony to how fluid globalisation is.
So back to your question about China starting a trade war. They could, but it would hurt them as much as the other country. It would leave them a little bit poorer, and would not achieve much beyond symbolism.
China is not independent for the inputs both material and capital to those industrial processes. They also are not able to consume all they produce so a vast majority of their outputs would dry up if they were to start a trade war.
One thing WFH advocates fail to recognize is that, if companies embrace it - now they have the ability to replace super high paying US based WFH employees with low cost WFH (anywhere in the world employee).
WFM advocates don’t realize that they are effectively advocating for offshoring their own job.
There is a thing called voting and companies in US should be wary of antagonizing people too far. Outsourcing isn't some constitutional right. Or they can move their company and headquarters overseas too.
Not really. Offshoring and outsourcing jobs has been a threat since the early 2000s and has never really manifested the way people claimed it would. High paying jobs are still here.
And if it ever did become a serious threat, we could just resort to blatant racism and stereotyping against foreign workers and that is enough to kick the can down the road a bit longer. Many companies simply will not hire offshore Indians because they believe they do inferior work compared to Americans, and Chinese are corporate spies/leakers.
There has to be labor protections for us employees and us companies or companies that do business here must adhere to it. After all, I cannot just get a visa to go live in India, even though I might be able to have more material wealth there just based on the power of the dollar. The U.S. citizen is at an inherit disadvantage due to other countries not being as friendly with the visa.
US government should also be careful about increasing the wealth of countries not in the us sphere of influence.
Hear, hear. You know where I’d like to offshore my job? Literally anywhere other than Missouri, where I live. WFH means I can participate in companies that do important work without having to move my family away from their family.
If that means I get replaced by a talented hacker from India someday, the tradeoff is still far north of worth it.
And someone living in Columbia or Peru, which is approx same timezone as Missouri, who make literally 1/10th the wage of someone in Missouri … now has the ability to get your job.
Be careful for what you wish for, is all I’m saying.
We engineers tend to take for granted just how specialized our knowledge has been, till recently. It seems unrealistic to expect this privilege to last forever. The rest of the world is catching up, and tools like ChatGPT might rapidly accelerate this race.
The way to survive is to adapt. It’s always been key.
Yes, this seems pretty obvious to me. The reason SV salaries are so high is in large part because of the high local costs of the Bay Area. I wouldn’t expect those to remain super inflated as remote work continues to spread and become more viable.
If the only value you provide to your employer is that you're physically present for a job that _can_ be done remotely you are close to being offshored anyways.
Besides the Capitalists have already made things terrible for people. “Give up more or they might make it more terrible” isn’t really convincing.
Like affording a house is impossible, kids are seen as a status symbol (like owning a BMW 20 years ago, or having a pet tiger or something). The retirement age goes up and up.
The global trade market is much older & stable then we think. Already in the 1600’s the Dutch figured out it was more efficient to import grains from Eastern Europe. And focus on agriculture fitting to the land. Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin came along. And some bad years during the war. But essentially the Dutch haven’t produced one of their main staple foods for the last 400 years.
We are in a complexity crisis and almost no one sees it. There isn’t a human on earth that could single handedly remake a factory that produces high quality carbon prepreg sheets.
We made world massively complex, but humans are absolutely no smarter than 10,000 years ago. This is extra bad for our below average types.
The kid working at Jiffy Lube flurry years ago could be competent at that, he had to know three oil filter styles, and four oils. Now, his generational equivalent has to know so much more and do it while globally connected to an attention-addiction.
