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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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6ZTn1t3Lsc

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.