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The U.S. needs a shipbuilding revolution

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Re: The U.S. needs a shipbuilding revolution

#201

Post by throw0101c »

kangaroozach wrote: post #143
FrustratedMonky wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"insulate the US shipbuilding industry from international competition, leading to them resting on their laurels" This is what I don't get. The Jones Act is about keeping ship building at home, in the US. So protective. By locking out foreign competition. It's a 'protective' law, to isolate and protect US industry. How will opening the US to buy and operate foreign ships, somehow make the US build more US ships? Look…

If you are protected from facing competition, then you don’t need to actually compete. Therefore, you don’t develop the competitive advantages. You remain at a competitive disadvantage, but it doesn’t matter since you don’t actually have to face the competition… until someday when the protection is removed and you are left to face the more advantaged competition.

> If you are protected from facing competition, then you don’t need to actually compete.

You mean like all the (e.g.) garment and other factories competed against foreign manufacturers… and the companies decided to close up shop and move overseas?

The main garments that are still made in the US are those for the military due to domestic production regulations in procurement rules.

Re: The U.S. needs a shipbuilding revolution

#202

Post by eunos »

peepeepoopoo105 wrote: post #6

This will never succeed because the economies of scale are nonexistent without dominance in the commercial shipbuilding market. War planners should have pushed to repeal the Jones Act decades ago, but now Chinese shipbuilding capacity is over 230 times greater than ours because of their success in civilian shipbuilding. The proposed measures in this aricle are too little too late. The only logical course of action at…

My tinfoil hat seeing Trump Admin wrecking havoc in the American continent is that they (or Trump specifically) believed that contesting American hegemony in Pacific within 1st island chain or even 2nd island chain is herculean task and it will be harder and harder as time goes due to the tyranny of distance and PLA modernization . So now the policy is American redoubt where US assert unanimous influence in the American continent while slowly recognize other great power's sphere of influence. Even hawkish Rubio already wrote about multipolarity.

Re: The U.S. needs a shipbuilding revolution

#203

Post by Ekaros »

globalnode wrote: post #178

Are ships really going to be a 'thing' in any next war anyway, in an age of missiles and drones (both above and below water)? It really pisses me off my dumbass govt spent hundreds of billions of dollars on what I believe will be irrelevant tech, and we may not even get the tech, hows that lol!!! "Here guys, have some money our taxpayers payed us, you don't even need to give us the goods". You'd think the pollies had…

Somehow you have to get the drones and missiles around. Or are cargo planes a thing? In age of missiles and drones...

I think it looks like those would need quite extreme ranges. Well intercontinental ballistic missiles are a real solution.

Re: The U.S. needs a shipbuilding revolution

#204

Post by RobKohr »

fifticon wrote: post #46

You can't get a revolution, but it appears you have managed to get a coup.

A democratic election without using violence to force a result is by definition not a coup.

It is ok to not like the result, but don't misappropriate words for it, thus diluting their meaning. Words having concrete meanings are important for reasonable discourse.

Re: The U.S. needs a shipbuilding revolution

#205

Post by AnimalMuppet »

Ekaros wrote: post #203
globalnode wrote: post #178

Are ships really going to be a 'thing' in any next war anyway, in an age of missiles and drones (both above and below water)? It really pisses me off my dumbass govt spent hundreds of billions of dollars on what I believe will be irrelevant tech, and we may not even get the tech, hows that lol!!! "Here guys, have some money our taxpayers payed us, you don't even need to give us the goods". You'd think the pollies had…

Somehow you have to get the drones and missiles around. Or are cargo planes a thing? In age of missiles and drones... I think it looks like those would need quite extreme ranges. Well intercontinental ballistic missiles are a real solution.

If you worry about missiles and drones taking out the cargo planes, don't you worry about missiles and drones taking out cargo ships as well?

Re: The U.S. needs a shipbuilding revolution

#206

Post by pas »

bluGill wrote: post #121
pydry wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>people, of course, are always surprised how expensive housing is, but then reject any kind of streamlined mass-manufactured option. It's a pretty specific type of person who rejects the construction of streamlined social housing - somebody who definitely doesnt pay rent and someone who probably receives it.

No it is people who have no idea how mass produced a conventional house is. They think there is something for a factory to do. Then they go elsewhere and complain how houses all look the same these days.

People do a lot of inconsistent things, a pretty bad one among these is complaining that housing is expensive, and then paying ~40% of the cost just for land every time someone wants to live somewhere, and when folks recommend putting homes on top of each other a plurality opposes this. (insert surprised pikachu image)

Of course there's a lot of things to automate. As I mentioned in this comment half of hard costs is labor.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42932445

Re: The U.S. needs a shipbuilding revolution

#207

Post by HideousKojima »

dmix wrote: post #158
FrustratedMonky wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"insulate the US shipbuilding industry from international competition, leading to them resting on their laurels" This is what I don't get. The Jones Act is about keeping ship building at home, in the US. So protective. By locking out foreign competition. It's a 'protective' law, to isolate and protect US industry. How will opening the US to buy and operate foreign ships, somehow make the US build more US ships? Look…

When you protect industries you get Boeing, you don't get productive markets, you get zombie companies who can fail all day without consequences and still get contracts because they are the mandatory only choice.

Airbus benefits from plenty of protectionist French/EU policies but don't seem to have the same issues that Boeing does

Re: The U.S. needs a shipbuilding revolution

#208

Post by lupusreal »

jabl wrote: post #129
throw0101c wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This will never succeed because the economies of scale are nonexistent without dominance in the commercial shipbuilding market. War planners should have pushed to repeal the Jones Act decades ago The US used to subsidize the salaries of US merchant marines on ships (US salaries are higher than Filipino ones) so that there would be a trained population, but that was stopped in the 1980s because subsidies are bad, so…

It seems an unintended side effect of the Jones act was to insulate the US shipbuilding industry from international competition, leading to them resting on their laurels while the rest of the industry worked hard to improve productivity (see Japan, South Korea, and lately China). Which makes it even harder to repeal, since with a repeal of the Jones act the wildly noncompetitive (civilian) US shipbuilding industry wo…

Part of the problem with American companies competing with the rest of the world on supposedly equal footing is American companies have to pay their sailors and abide by workplace regulations that Chinese/etc shipping can ignore. In other words it's not equal footing, it can't be equal footing, and America should stop pretending that competing on equal footing with shipping companies that use slave labor would even be a good thing. Subsidies are necessary, the libertarians who hate that can get bent.

Re: The U.S. needs a shipbuilding revolution

#209

Post by K0balt »

Sadly, and I say this with an equal measure of sadness and conviction, the bell has been rung on this (and industrial might in general )for 2+ decades.

There was a chance to rebuild the us into a formidable industrial power, but it was lost in the early 2000s.

We gifted all of our knowledge advantages to an industrial adversary with a 4:1 population and resource advantage. They have improved their primary education to be vastly superior to ours, and their secondary education is not far behind.

Strategic goals were superseded by greed, and we will now have to settle for second fiddle or lower on the world stage with no hope of recovering a leadership role. Our military might will eventually be eclipsed by China as well, and in the interim will only serve to slightly slow our fading into irrelevance, while being an increasingly heavy yoke to bear as the expense of maintaining aging systems that we cannot replace continues to grow.

Yet, There is one inflection point that we might possibly be able to change this at: an all out, no holds barred investment in space resource and energy harvesting:

this expands our high technology edge, gives us a resource advantage, gives us new territory, incentivises rapid robotic expansion of our industrial capacity….

We could leverage dominance in the space frontier while we still possess the military advantage on-planet to defend our will to do so. But we will have to throw everything behind the effort, in basically a wartime footing, or we cannot hope to succeed.

This is quite literally the last chance to avoid a CCP dominated world within 5 decades.

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