What has changed is the proportion of working people employed in manufacturing - which has dropped. But this is inevitable unless you want to roll back decades of technical advancement and investment. And this is happening in all countries and is an inevitable consequence of manufacturing improvements. Nor is the phenomena novel - it happened about 100 years ago in agriculture which had previously been the biggest employer.
What has also dropped is its share of US GDP - but this is because other sectors - e.g. IT - have boomed - not because manufacturing has been in decline.
[1] https://nam.org/state-manufacturing-data/2022-united-states-...
If you order a small batch of custom PCBs with a five day turnaround from a fab house in the USA it costs over $500. If you order it from China they cost $15.
And it's not just due to cheaper labor. They have better higher volume equipment.
Edit: I’d love to find a non-state source but China claims $5T per year in manufacturing output for 2021. I wonder where the US would be if we had focused on manufacturing growth instead of offshoring production.
http://english.scio.gov.cn/m/pressroom/2022-03/01/content_78...
Given the extreme efficiency of international shipping logistics, I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect any given metro area to have competitive world class manufacturing of every type. The cost of real estate alone makes it hard to compete.
Quote for 100 boards (ENIG) on Bay Area Circuits, 10 days lead time, excluding shipping: $1000 ($1244 for 5 days lead time)
Todays quote for exact same 100 boards (ENIG) on pcbway.com, _including_ DHL shipping cost, 2 days lead time: $148 (shipping to Bay Area is usually 2 days with DHL, so really 4 days lead time). I've never had any quality issues and my boards have fine pitch 0.4mm BGA parts.
Yeah no, not even close. Certainly not marginally higher.
It's slightly cheaper than oshpark.com, they want $15 a board.
Together we prototyped a product over a 2 month period, him handling the HW and EE bits and me writing the board firmware and HIL simulator/test-harness.
We would get some boards, he would find and correct any issues with the board, get a new file to the board house before 5pm and we would get new boards in the morning at 9am delivered by a motorbike courier for about $20 or something. As a software guy that seemed pretty insane to me.
All up we probably did about 6 or 7 HW revisions like that and a few of those probably could have been avoidable if more care was taken but why would we when it's so cheap to iterate so quickly?
Unfortunately for various reasons we didn't choose to continue the project but I learnt a hell of a lot and really enjoyed hanging in Shenzhen and getting to understand the hacker culture there a bit more. We burnt overall a pretty small amount of money to learn some important lessons that I think would have been much more expensive anywhere else in the world.
If you every write more about it, please post a link here in HN, I'm sure tons of people would be interested in more details about the what, why, how of what you were doing, and life in Shenzhen.
China is dramatically cheaper than domestic.
If it wasn't for the DoD requiring all military parts be domestically manufactured, there probably wouldn't be a board house (or metal fab) left in the US.
As far as PCB fab or PCBA quality issues, I’m unable to think of any problems I’ve had across 15+ orders over the last three years. I just got another two PCBA jobs back in the last couple weeks and they were great.
I’m honestly in awe of what JLCPCB does and it’s a big inspiration to me for how much better things could be in the USA if we were committed to manufacturing.
> The Universal Postal Union set up a fee so richer countries would pay more to have their international mail delivered than countries with developing economies.
> "The central idea is that any citizen or business should be able to send mail packages through the Global Postal Network to any destination," said Schoorl.
> At the time, China was considered a country with a developing economy, meaning the country would be charged less for international mail than other countries. And that went unchanged for decades.
> As e-commerce took off in the 2010s, China found itself with a major competitive advantage. It could ship to North America at a cheap rate. Canada Post and the U.S. Postal Service were delivering packages and not being compensated very well, says Schoorl.
* https://www.cbc.ca/radio/costofliving/shipping-canada-china-...
> China is still considered a “transitional” country by the UPU, which means it enjoys a lower rate for sending mail to a developed nation like the US. As a result, mail services from China to the US cost less than Americans are charged by their own postal service for a comparable domestic delivery. This gives Chinese sellers a competitive edge over American sellers, especially in e-commerce platforms like eBay or Amazon, where shipping cost is a major factor for buyers.
* https://medium.com/@contact_53404/why-is-it-so-cheap-to-ship...
It shouldn't be cheaper to ship something from China than from the next town over.
Then to paper over the losses of having to carry that massively underpriced mail from China, local deliveries have to increase in cost.
And I’m not saying “every metro should have competitive world class manufacturing of every type”, which is such a strong claim as to feel strawman-ish (but I get the sense you didn’t mean to do so). I do however deeply wish we had Shenzhen-like manufacturing hubs on the east and west coasts.
There is of course a large labour cost delta and probably a skills shortage in the US that might be an obstacle for making something like this be economically sustainable/competitive - but if it could be automated sufficiently so that labour cost is less of an issue, is this even feasible in theory?
I know there are some fabs being built, but beyond that is some kind of broader electronics manufacturing hub in the US conceivable?
From the article it sounds like the manufacturing is staying in Asia but moving to politically allied countries where new infra is being built for this. Is it still mainly a labour cost issue?
My complaint is that domestic board houses are super expensive, so I meant competitive with Chinese production. The person replying to me above said they are "marginally more expensive" but another commenter here went through the full quoting process and got a price that is about 8x higher than a reputable fab in China, which is not "marginally more expensive".
So why go domestic? For us, there were IP concerns (that we'd already seen with non-electronic products), there were concerns about shipments getting held up in customs, and there were concerns about manufacturing support. If you want boards to be flashed and tested at the factory, so you can dropship your assembled product to whatever its final destination, its very valuable to send somebody to the board house to work with their integration engineers to do it. I ended up spending most of a week commuting to a board house in Fremont in 2021, so I could train up their people on operating the programming and testing jig we'd built, and operating the calibration system we'd built. Driving from my home (at the time) in Oakland to Fremont was much much easier than flying to Shenzen (or wherever), I didn't have to contend with the great firewall, and if something went wrong, I could be over in 45 minutes. All during the California (and also China) Covid lockdowns.
That is what you're getting with a domestic board house, so if none of that is a concern, there's really no reason to pay the borderline extortionate premium to do it.
Probably poorer for one. Every American working in a state-subsidised manufacturing role is one less American working in an industry where the US has a competitive advantage, like software or energy production.
Of course if war breaks out that goes out the window.
It is unlikely, I think (thankfully) that we’ll have an existential war with China, because we’re both nuclear armed.
Like, say Panama has a civil war that shuts down the canal. That adds a huge cost to shipping, going around South America. Or say Europe (but not the US) gets involved in a war with Russia, redirecting the _massive_ European manufacturing capacity to local needs instead of exports.
All that is just to say, it is nice to have local production of stuff like food and energy that is needed to keep things going.
Do we employ so many such workers, that there are none left over for any sort of manufacturing?
Some of what we're seeing from the r/antiwork crowd, where a bunch of millennials and zoomers are complaining that their Starbucks jobs don't pay enough comes from the fact that, for many of them, that is the only class of job available (retail/restaurants). They might welcome regular-schedule, $17/hour jobs, which wasn't an unknown rate for manufacturing in the US when I was young in the late 1980s/1990s.
I struggle to understand the attitudes and narcissism of the leaders within this country that decided we didn't have to make our own products, that people elsewhere in the world would do it for us while we really didn't do anything at all. I wonder if they thought software could employ all the people who are griping right now about living wages and meaningful work.
Incredible reserves of natural gas and oil to start with. Massive solar and wind potential as well, way beyond other highly-populated parts of the world. A huge, skilled population capable of designing and building indigenous nuclear reactors, and the capital reserves to fund and build basically whatever is needed.
> Do we employ so many such workers, that there are none left over for any sort of manufacturing?
Money going into building inefficient factories is money not spent educating software engineers, building solar farms, or. developing new gas fracking technologies. Regardless of it being public or private capital. It's not that there aren't enough workers, it's that effort spent in one way is necessarily effort not spent in another.
Slightly reducing economic efficiency may well be worth it if the result is social stability, and almost definitely to prepare for an eventual war or crisis. But we shouldn't pretend like there's no trade-off here. That's how we got into this free-trade deindustrialised problem in the first place.
While our pricing structure and regulations favor offshore, but aren’t US tax payers bearing the true cost of safe international shipping and reliable offshore manufacturing?
It doesn't always, but let's be honest, most attempts to do so mean massive subsidies for manufacturers to set up in the US.
> but aren’t US tax payers bearing the true cost of safe international shipping and reliable offshore manufacturing
Arguably yes (although not the only e.g. British, Danish, and Greek ships are assisting in the Red Sea right now).
Meanwhile the Chinese competitors always failes the DRC due to laughably bad tolerances. I'm talking about edge mounted through hole connectors, not some deeply buried via barely squeezed in.
America can absolutely lose out on low-cost parts while increasing its manufacturing base. It's an insanely large field.
I would be SO MUCH FASTER at developing my farming robot if I was in a manufacturing mecca like Shenzhen. That is what I wish we could have here in the US. Not a small number of high value manufacturers, but the whole damn chain. Not only would it make our development faster, it would make our products better and cheaper and it would make our lives better.
Just to nitpick, the first inflation calculator i opened told me us inflation rate across the last 10 years has been 31.8%. So there has been some growth but not as much as you make it look.
Just going by Taylor's response sibling to this comment; he says a PCB in the US cost $500 and China $15 - that is more than an order of magnitude efficiency improvement moving to China. $2.5T wouldn't be much to crow about with that sort of productivity gap, because that would be equivalent to less than $250B in China. Presumably PCBs are an extreme case, but it goes to show that a dollar figure doesn't tell us much about the actual capabilities of the US manufacturing sector.
Given the struggles the US has had with energy [0], down 22% from their peak, it is suspicious that manufacturing is at all time highs. Something got squeezed really hard since the 70s in real terms.
[0] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-energy-use?tab...
It's not 40% higher in dollar value terms 10 years ago, that's for sure. You are leaving out the part about how the US dollar has lost value. Inflation is well in excess of 40% over the last ten years.
I think the more interesting question is if it would even be economically possible to have a Shenzhen in the US, given US property prices, labor force, wages, environmental laws, zoning restrictions, etc.
It definitely seems like once some of the factors you mention come into play these things lose momentum and move. Paul Krugman did some very interesting work on economic geography, with one result being that the leading region for a given sector will have a huge margin over the second player, so being in top position is very valuable.
"Radio Row was torn down in 1966 to make room for the World Trade Center." (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Row#Demolition)
It's a little disingenuous when someone claims that the US meets its climate change goals and that China doesn't. The US is able to meet those goals in part because all of the goods it consumes comes from China where it is manufactured with coal-produced power and so-on.
I suspect that economic theory doesn't adequately explain some things that we need to understand better. There may be misunderstood risks in competitive advantage that we are ignoring at our peril.
I used to shop at these places religiously. At no point did these businesses appear to be "booming". I worked at Circuit City right up until the end. Margin on selling finished computers to customers was already pretty flimsy. I don't think selling boxes of components is moving us toward a less-challenging business model.
What about the electronics shops that are still around? Don't you have Microcenter in California, or is this another thing that Texas is winning at?
Aside from the fact that this is not my area of expertise (I am a robotics engineer), I assume the same forces that made things difficult for those companies would making things difficult for me.
And as I said earlier I think the practice of private equity firms buying property is raising prices across the board and making things more difficult for everyone. That’s not a bogey man that’s a specific claim.
Whatever else you say about the perceived viability of those companies, they’re valuable for rapidly designing new products. That’s why Shenzhen and Tokyo have famous electronics markets.
As for me I don't see anything wrong with buying from mouser. Radio shack and fry's were always out of the desirable or exotic parts.
Buying from mail order is okay for off the shelf parts but what about custom parts like PCBs and machined parts? And what do you do when you get your mouser order and realize you forgot something important? Having options nearby just means more speed. And that’s what I’m talking about. We’re settling for slower speed than is possible and I don’t like that. They don’t settle for slow in Shenzhen I don’t see why we should.
PCBs were never local in my life and I don't remember them to be. You could always make your own with a copper PCB, but now you can etch and use a 3d printer so that's actually gotten better. There's maker spaces by me as well.
I don't think there's ever been a better time to do these kinds of projects even compared any other "golden age" in my life. By the time Arduino was around these places were already dead.
Congrats on a cool job. I love seeing engineering.
We had...like 4 Radio Shacks in my not-very-large town in the 80's. I don't think we had enough electronics nerds to support that, I wonder as a chain what the internal struggle was to keep that line of business going.
They had all kinds of electronics alongside it - computers, RC cars, tons of radios and stereos. but by the late 90's and early 2000's they turned into just selling batteries, cell phones, service plans, power adapters...
I don't remember when, but at some point a buddy and I went in there to get some resistors or something for a project, and they no longer sold them.
There are enough people who would like to have a local store for things like resisters (at 10x the street price if you mail order), 3d printer filament and other "nerd hobby" toys to support a new radio shack type store in most every city. However getting such a store started would be difficult.
You paid a premium to buy from the store, for the privilege of being able to see the merchandise before spending.
Now, you can order it off of Amazon with one day shipping, after having looked at numerous high resolution color images, and probably a dozen Youtube videos as well, all to see if it is the product you want and need. And if it's not, chances are that it can be returned for a refund with little hassle.
They've nailed the ability to do the initial purchase online, and that's what would build loyalty for a specialty storefront, that's the one purchase where people often wouldn't dare mail order. That's the purchase where someone gives you word of mouth advertising.
This might even have been flipped on its head, where the stores that are still large enough to have survived until now have people coming into the showroom to see what they want, but then ordering the same model off of Amazon or where ever to get their volume discount. That couldn't have worked earlier, as the only company that might have the same products mail order was the same as the store front.
We live in an era where the only brick and mortars that could possibly survive are those that sell highly perishable goods (groceries) or products for which even next day shipping are too late (plumbing repair parts at hardware stores).
I think that in the beginning manufacturing at both large and small scale was incredibly cheap in Schenzen. So were the components and hardware.
In US people want large margins so things can't be cheap enough to have another Schenzen. Also, Schenzen has a culture of sharing while US has a culture of secrecy, patents and intellectual property.
This 2009 article from Bunnie Huang about the "Shanzai" culture of sharing in Shenzhen is a big inspiration for my thinking on problems with intellectual property restrictions: https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=284
Somehow, through various constraints and processes it's "better" overall for me and 500 other people to buy a hand tool (drill, angle-grinder, saw, etc), than it is for a dozen of such tools to be stocked at a shared-center like a maker/hacker space for us all to use that odd time we need it in the year.
500 tools sold means X% more truck delivery trips, more than Y% of hours worked by dock loaders, Z$ of rented space, A$ of margin added by a supplier, B$ of supplier warehouse space rented, etc etc etc.
We've settled on a local-maxima that adds a lot of imaginary "GDP" points while the value is sucked out away from all of the rest of us.
Most tools you should buy - or get a neighbor to buy. There is a lot of friction going to a maker space for some tool. It is much easier to grab your own drill when you need one than to go elsewhere to get it.
Renting stuff as a business only makes sense if you can ask for reasonably high rent to cover your costs. Very expensive stuff (professional cameras, cars, bridal dresses) meets this criterion. A drill that costs 200 USD doesn't. How much can you ask for a day of rent of such a drill? 10 USD? That covers the cost of keeping the shop open for a few minutes at most.
Borrowing/lending stuff between friends makes a lot more sense, but you are limited to a fairly small set of people and you must be socially not-inept not to irk them with unreasonable requests; also, it happens that many people need the same type of object at nearly the same time (a day off with nice weather is great for gardening, so everyone is gardening; whoops, snow has fallen, everyone needs their shovels in the morning).
The renting solution would have more GDP, because it would simply be more expensive - and that's why it doesn't really exist.
I think my tweaks would be:
(1) lowering the lifetime for non pharma patents
(2) allowing forking from an earlier release of an extended patent
(3) give tax incentives for companies that will not enforce royalties for domestic manufacturers
(4) companies with small enough revenue cannot be sued for IP infringement
I could easily be talked out of these I think but right now this is what I would support
Gorgive my cynicism, but I wonder if there is any strong political will to do anything good and proper at all? The way I see it since the privatization/neoliberal wave politicians in most nations realized that there is more money for them in it if instead of one state owned entity you give things to 10 private ones, 8 of which you have ties to, 2 of which you will "work" at after your political career.
Sure, I could imagine a national state doing what is needed, just not under the current political climate when it comes to economics. There are still many people out there who believe these things need to be solved by guiding the invisible hand of the market, when everywhere you look it has made things shittier, except the bank account of the few lucky ones.
I am not saying people shouldn't be allowed to earn money. What I say that anything that isn't about extracting money from the system needs another form of incentive structure.
I think a lot of this is just because the rent is too damn high. How can a local shop expect to compete against online sellers who don't have nearly as much overhead? Here in Japan, we don't have this problem so much: there are tons of little mom-n-pop shops all over the place. But many factors like rent and zoning help make it viable for small businesses to stay afloat, that wouldn't be able to in America. Here, a business can exist in a 20 m^2 space on the 5th floor of some building that has no parking at all; that's basically illegal in America. I imagine some things like that are similar in Shenzhen.
>Bringing chip fabs back is good.
It sounds like a good idea, but throwing money at the problem isn't going to magically make a skilled workforce appear that can operate these fabs.
https://48hills.org/2022/04/american-steel-burning-man-artis...
EDIT: Fun fact, I did approach the building, got the manager's number from someone, and called her. When I said I needed 2000 square feet she actually laughed, said "we typically rent out 20,000 square feet or more", said she would "try to find me something" and then never called me back.
There are industrial spaces near me ~ $6/sq/yr with configurable sizes where you could do all this. This is also 30 minutes from a international airport.
It's like complaning that someone can't build a factory in manhattan because real estate firms bought all the land.
If we in the USA are supposed to compete against that, we need to start thinking about how to build our cities or culture to provide similar features to Chinese society.
Not like their human rights or whatever, but their specific production specs. How quickly you can physically shop in Shenzhen in person to look for parts, how easy it is to share designs in the engineering community, the economies of scale and so forth.
We are getting our ass kicked on electronics production. We really should think about emulating China now on this subject.
The US had all that 100 years ago. We are passed that stage and bringing it back is going to have to be artificial and forced. And probably won't even work.
China is not a USA that figured out cheap manufacturing. China is an emerging economy that reaped the benefits of being an emerging economy (lax regulation + borderline slave labor). The same way (generally) the USA did 100 years ago to get to the advanced economy stage it is at today.
There are no legions of pre-packed pick-and-place machines in the USA that are hooked up to internet orders so that a machine handles nearly the entire process from PCB-manufacturing to PCB-Assembly / Pick-and-place, and then shipped out to you for less than $100.
Seriously: checkout the PCB and Assembly prices here: https://jlcpcb.com/
Yes, there's some degree of low wages going on here. But there's *ALSO* benefits to scale. Internet-scale production and centralization means they can take orders and achieve efficiencies completely impossible in the USA right now.
Now as EEs (be it hobbyist or professional), we need to start thinking about this difference in manufacturing flexibility. USA can keep up with China in terms of overall manufacturing (ex: if someone orders 100,000+ boards and assembly, USA can somewhat compete). But when it comes down to smaller orders, China is just far more flexible. In ways suggesting far superior automation (not just cheaper labor)
Really, think about these prices. Its obvious that jlcpcb just has a pre-made pipeline of pick-and-place machines covering the 500,000 in-house parts, and thus can offer extremely cheap assembly of those specific reels as its likely all automated.
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This ain't early 1900s bub. This is China today. This is what we're competing against, and people need to wake up to the fact that we've fallen behind.
That's not "slave labor". That's manufacturing and automation. USA is behind in this kind of training, schooling, and industrial understanding.
That's not some unskilled bozo they picked off the street. That's a Chinese engineer, likely trained from a University, who has Electronics knowledge likely exceeding many American Engineers (especially in the field of manufacturing that we're falling behind on). They program computers to assemble these devices. They have web-programmers to convert our Gerber files or KiCAD files into pick-and-place primitives. They have optimized assembly lines to minimize human error and maximize automation.
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There's a few shops in the USA that can do this sort of stuff, but no one close to the scale, reliability, or price of JLCPCB right now. That's the problem.
Its not "slave labor" or "low-economy" crap that they're beating us in anymore. Its high-tech, advanced economy automation. Do you think anyone in the USA has a pick-and-place machine / PCB-assembly line that well made? And flexible enough to handle random internet orders of quantity 10?
The US used to have insane manufacturing skill and logistics, but has since moved past it, especially in the last 30ish years. The US is now a fully fledged advanced economy, and likewise is primarily focused on high margin/high skilled service work.
China will likely move away from manufacturing too if it moves into advanced economy territory, at which point some other agricultural economy will start their foray into manufacturing, and sell to China for cheap.
This is how economies work. It's unprecedented for an advanced economy to bring back emerging economy manufacturing, it's experimental and untested for sure.
If services have settled upon "Use China for Manufacturing", instead of ya know, building better manufacturing centers or figuring out training programs or other such advancements, then the economy has failed us.
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The only way this so called "advanced service economy" actually benefits America is if we create better products, better research, better designs and make due with fewer workers on a realistic level.
If we're just sending money overseas its obviously a loss in the long run.
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USA's manufacturing prowess is still there btw. It took advanced computers, chemicals, and life-sciences to develop the COVID19 vaccines (and the updates to said vaccines) so quickly. China has seemingly been unable to replicate the feat.
But in _specifically_ electronics, China has pulled far ahead of us. I think USA wins in chemical and energy sciences for the most part. (China getting a big lead on LiFePo4 though).
At some point, we need to think and look hard upon ourselves and self-reflect. Why is our service economy unable to replicate the advanced designs and advanced factories that China can so easily stamp out?
We're supposed to have better software. We're supposed to have better engineers and better design services. But at the end of the day, China out-manufactures us in the realm of electronics. Thinking and reflecting upon this, as well as the nature of service economies and what our "services" and "advanced economy" is supposed to accomplish is key.
That's not manufacturing so much as R&D. China isn't so great in that department, but they're great at pumping out manufactured goods with slightly behind-cutting-edge technologies at huge volumes. If China had access to all the R&D behind the mRNA vaccines, they could probably manufacture them too.
Consistently, and safely, doing this to the scale of hundreds-of-millions of doses or even billions-of-doses is obviously a big manufacturing feat.
People complained good and hard about not being able to open/run a bodega in Manhattan because firms 'bought up all the land' - to the point Mom and pop shops got significant legislative benefits. To everyone's benefit(?)
I love this aspect of Japan, though. The mixed nature of neighborhoods is magical.
Source: 5 years living in Aomori.
It's fine if the places where 80% of people live are walkable and the rest maybe aren't as great.
And in any case, I am from Spain, a country were even small villages a pretty walkable. There was an article here recently explaining it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38189840
I don't know about that. My experience (in the UK) is small, rural places are by default walkable 'cause they haven't changed that much in the last coupel of centuries, when you had to be walkable since cars and bikes didn't exist.
There is a high likelihood that the old town square has been taken over by local government offices. If you work there great, but otherwise not the type of place you would visit often if at all.
In short they still have the walkabel guts from the 1800s, but there is nothing to walk to.
If we go back in time to North America in the late 1800s, for comparison, it's much the same. People didn't have cars, and while some people had horses, they were expensive and not everyone did. The towns had a railroad station and otherwise were very walkable. There were no parking lots forcing low density because there were no cars.
Edit: note that I don't mean to imply that all smaller towns or cities in Japan are like this. The boring towns that are copies of suburban America are places I simply wouldn't visit, because there's absolutely nothing interesting there for a visitor (just like suburban America); the towns I've visited are interesting, cute towns in the mountains that actually attract tourists for some reason (onsen, access to mountain trails, etc.).
And if not walkable, bikable - I biked to a hacker space in Dublin (Ireland, not the BA one) for a while with zero parking but most people walked or biked there. A folding bike meant even less space was necessary.
But people have assured me that $current_mode_of_capitalism is the best, nay, the only way to stimulate innovation and creativity and growth? /s
In hindsight, they obviously were indulging in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motivated_reasoning
Same here in Germany. Conrad, the nation's only electronic parts retail chain, closed down its physical stores during Covid... and even a big city such as Munich does not have an electronic parts store. You gotta drive out to Bürklin in Unterhaching now, and they're geared towards professionals, not amateurs.
I still have a bottle of flux I've got from them in my closet. The funny thing about it is it leaves conductive traces unless cleaned. Not the best choice for the only flux on the shelf on an electronic DIY shop.
Yep, agreed. But online has its own problems... Amazon is full of shit with zero supply chain control, including safety-relevant stuff like fuses [1], or stuff secretly dropshipped from China or grey-imported from the UK or shipped from Poland with way more than a day of lead time. eBay is even worse.
Bürklin is good but they do take their while to ship because they don't have an insane volume deal with DHL.
And all of online is useless if you have stuff like weird connectors you need to find a matching mate or want to make sure <component> physically fits, or want to find a component that fits. No problem at Conrad, a huge and annoying hassle with online.
> Do we have strong political will to create something like that here?
Tragically, we've got deeper problems than not enough jobs. Public schooling in the USA has become largely dysfunctional. Major population centers have shocking, 3rd-world-or-worse literacy rates (like ~50%, not-kidding). You can't have illiterate folks in a chip fab.
This is the kind of problem that requires a "1960's space race" approach, but it just isn't going to happen anymore.
Why work in a chip fab clean room for 10 hours a day when you can make 2x the pay to work from home on software projects? Or do financial analysis in a trendy office with a hybrid schedule?
I can tell you that manufacturing offers -zero- work from home options. Which usually entails "We need you here this weekend" too. Even if you aren't a top shelf student, you can still get more comfy better paying advanced economy jobs.
Its labor that’s cheap there not rent.
Seriously, manufacturing engineers in Shenzhen have higher wages than Ukraine and even Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary. And yet most electronic prototyping and manufacturing happens in Schengen and not Eastern Europe.
Why is that I wonder? /Rhetorical question
Yes, local brick and mortar specialty shops have shuttered, but we still have Jameco, Digikey, McMaster, etc. The center of the design and industrial universe is the US, has been, will be. It's a resources thing, natural and human.
There’s one near me in South Carolina called Synergy Mill and I believe it’s an MIT Fab Lab?
Mouser Electronics is less than an hour away from me. Microcenter is an extremely short drive (I routinely get lunch around there) and has lots of hobby electronics stuff. The local hacker space is filled with people, full classes almost every day and people making things all the time. The university near me has a busy hackerspace as well for students. Meetups for software developers are routinely packed. I'm surrounded by chip fabs, high-value equipment manufacturing, board fabrication, and engineering firms every corner I turn.
We are not and cannot recreate the Chinese manufacturing sector in the USA. Firstly the scale is all wrong, in most cases we're not going to produce for the entire globe, just our own needs and that of our friends. Second, what we are doing is being done in Mexico, the USA, and Canada. Not just the USA. Thirdly, this has been happening for years now, a lot longer than most have been aware due to the shale revolution making nat gas energy and byproducts dirt cheap. The pandemic supply shocks and the accelerating break down in globalization is just the latest motivator.
Bringing chip fabs back is good. It is a strategic move that ensures we have control over chip security for critical devices. But it does not follow that bringing chip fabs back means that all manufacturing is coming back.
My local hacker space is struggling to keep its doors open. All my local electronics shops (in the Bay Area!) have closed down. The small independent hardware stores are closing down too. People who actually want to build things are having a harder and harder time getting it done. Everything is owned by private equity firms who raise the price so high that people not already making a profit are getting squeezed out, which removes space for learning, prototyping, and risk taking.
Compare all this to Shenzhen where you can get everything you need fabricated in a small area. It is important to keep in mind that Shenzhen was built relatively quickly, so perhaps we could do that here. But will we? I admit I only know the basics of the creation of Shenzhen but it sounds like strong political will to create it was an important part.
Do we have strong political will to create something like that here? I honestly don't think we do. I am concerned that our political system is so overrun with corruption, infighting, finger pointing, and empty gestures meant to get likes on Twitter that the work needed to actually make manufacturing happen here would never get done.