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Why the U.S. can't build icebreaking ships

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Re: Why the U.S. can't build icebreaking ships

#191

Post by xyzzyz »

cogman10 wrote: post #102
cyberax wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The US has globalized away its maritime industry It hasn't. Jones Act _protects_ the US maritime industry, so it stagnated and died. Nobody wants the US ships unless they have to use them, they're crap compared to ships from other countries. > and they still can't find builders. That's because shipyards are basically a defense industry subsidiary. So they receive a fixed amount of orders, and it's known for years i…

> The shipyards are also unionized to hell and back, with VERY cushy contracts. The problem here isn't the unions, it's the fact that we privatized building ships. It's yet another example that privatizing all parts of the government is a fundamentally bad idea. Government goals do not align with private industry goals and private industry, particularly in a well captured market like defense and ship building, gets t…

Sorry, what are you talking about? None of this is true. Government-owned shipyards were not historically responsible for significant fraction of delivered tonnage. In fact, given the utter atrophy of private shipbuilding industry in US today, I wouldn't be surprised if the percentage of tonnage delivered by government owned shipyards today was higher than ever.

Re: Why the U.S. can't build icebreaking ships

#192

Post by xyzzyz »

roenxi wrote: post #122
cogman10 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The shipyards are also unionized to hell and back, with VERY cushy contracts. The problem here isn't the unions, it's the fact that we privatized building ships. It's yet another example that privatizing all parts of the government is a fundamentally bad idea. Government goals do not align with private industry goals and private industry, particularly in a well captured market like defense and ship building, gets t…

I see downvotes at the time I commented, which is unfortunate as ideas should be at least explored. Someone on the internet has been keeping statistics [0] that do suggest the collapse in output happened in the 1980s. But on the other hand, the same stats show a steady decline in the number of companies from 1950 that was only stabilised after the collapse in output, so it is probably arguable that the high-productio…

Yes, the collapse has happened, but it had not happened due to "privatization" of government shipyard. These were all privately owned shipyard that collapsed. The comment you are responding to is inventing some kind of alternative history that simply has not happened, and probably this is why it's downvoted.

Re: Why the U.S. can't build icebreaking ships

#193

Post by xyzzyz »

vlovich123 wrote: post #106
cyberax wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unionized workers can be hired on a temporary basis With these unions ("Boilermakers")? No chance. They can officially give their jobs to their _children_ upon retiring. There is a waiting list for apprenticeships. You have to complete 8000 hours of apprenticeship, even if you are already qualified. > By cushy contracts this means that the amount of wealth extraction from workers is not as great as it is in other A…

For what it’s worth American workers as a whole make ~20x what Turkish workers do. While American shipbuilders make more than the average while Turkish ones are closer to their average countrymen, the 20x discrepancy in salaries doesn’t seem limited to shipbuilding. So not sure about the characterization of “sucking on the teat of taxpayers” per se vs overall higher regulations and salaries in the US.

US-built cars do not cost 20 times that of Turkey-built cars.

Re: Why the U.S. can't build icebreaking ships

#194

Post by euroderf »

everybodyknows wrote: post #88
Animats wrote: post #56

Now that Finland is a member of NATO, it would make sense to outsource icebreakers to Finland. Finland has 64 F-35 jets on order from the US, costing more than a few icebreakers. VT Halter Marine, the troubled US contractor, went bust and was sold in 2022.

Of course, but then Congress couldn't create a jobs program to scare up a few more votes for the incumbent in certain districts. And so job security triumphs over national security.

Might as well go all in then and equip the ships with the world's best buggy whips.

Re: Why the U.S. can't build icebreaking ships

#195

Post by TrickyRick »

shiroiushi wrote: post #186
nostrademons wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Music, movies, microcode, and high-speed pizza delivery.

Music? I don't think anyone listens to American music these days outside of America (and maybe Canada). America used to produce great music, back in the 60s-80s, that people around the world wanted to listen to, but that went away after the 2000s. American movies, however, are still quite popular abroad. Offhand, I'd say it's one of America's biggest exports. "Microcode" is the other one, if you mean things like CPU…

There's this Taylor girl who seems pretty popular but maybe you're right, the record concert sales probably implies nobody is listening to her.

Re: Why the U.S. can't build icebreaking ships

#196

Post by phil21 »

Sakos wrote: post #177
cpursley wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Russia is out producing the US on guided munitions and rockets fired from the ground as well (and missile defense). And icebreakers, of course. So it’s doable - just depends on priorities (ie, moving chip manufacturing back which seems to have us recent success).

US shipyards and military production are extremely low on any number of metrics. It's unclear even now whether the US has enough stockpiles and enough production of modern munitions to maintain an active war against a peer adversary like China with such massive production capacity and such a massive population. At some point, you do need constant production of enough munitions, doesn't matter how smart or precise tho…

> It's unclear even now whether the US has enough stockpiles and enough production of modern munitions to maintain an active war against a peer adversary like China with such massive production capacity and such a massive population.

I don't think it's unclear at all. It's uncomfortable to call out an obvious truth: We couldn't even compare. The only hope we have is basically economic mutually assured destruction. If it comes to a hot war, it better be over (without going nuclear) within weeks or at most single digit months or it's more or less over. At least from where I'm standing.

It's unclear if the US could even get production ramped up on the scale of a decade. We simply don't have the people to train the people we need. Much less the people with the skills to do the thing.

Re: Why the U.S. can't build icebreaking ships

#197

Post by danenania »

mmooss wrote: post #59
kazen44 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having your own manufacturing and industrial base is also very, very important from a geopolitical perspective. (as european countries have come to realise after the invasion of ukraine). you need your own industrial base to manufacture and develop the machinery you need to defend and project hard and soft power across the globe. Globalisation was supposed to "solve this issue" by making economies so interconnected t…

> Sadly, we have learned that that simply does not hold up. We've learned that the world now is more divided and violent than we had hoped, with the revisionist Chinese and Russians on one side and the US Republicans on the other (or sometimes on the same side as Russia!) So we depend more on the military, and also we can't depend on China's manufacturing to supply military goods. But can the US depend on Europe's, S…

If you're measuring in decades, can you take any alliance for granted? Things can change in unpredictable ways.

Taking Europe as an example, if Trump or someone like him decides to leave Europe to its own devices while facing an aggressive Russia, we could see massive re-militarization. Who can say where a shift like this would lead? It's easy to view these countries as permanent allies when they depend on us for security, but they might not be so cooperative once they can stand up for themselves militarily.

This applies to Japan and South Korea as well vis a vis China/NK.

Re: Why the U.S. can't build icebreaking ships

#198

Post by wakawaka28 »

hintymad wrote: post #184
wakawaka28 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There's really no excuse that the cost of making canon shells is 10x higher than Russia. Isn't being able to manufacturing cheaply the signature of a highly developed society? We have prioritized high wages for workers in the US, a phenomenon also driven by the reserve currency status of the dollar. Russians, Chinese, and Indians work for a fraction of the price we do. We have high labor costs and have to import man…

> We have prioritized high wages for workers in the US I'm not sure if this is the dominating factor. Russia fired around 10,000 shells a day, and each costs about $1000. So for a year, Russia would have fired 3.65M shells that cost $3.6B. Let's say we need 100 workers to produce these shells. Then, he wage of the workers would cost merely $10M a year, if each one earns $100K a year. $10M over 3.65M shells, and that'…

Are you kidding? Everything is outsourced because wages are high in the US. I can't believe I have to spell out such basic and obvious economic facts to presumably intelligent people.

>What the US lost was not advantage of labor cost, but the economy of scale.

We've lost a lot of things but the reason things are expensive here is NOT that we didn't have economies of scale. That issue came much later. You get to have scale in the first place by being economically competitive. When things are outsourced due to some other country using slave labor or else their workers surviving on a tenth of what you make in the US, that is when you lose economies of scale.

Literally the only way we could compete in an open market with countries that have cheap labor is to use automation. But even with automation, those machines can be set up anywhere in the world, and they will tend to go wherever it is cheapest to run them.

Re: Why the U.S. can't build icebreaking ships

#199

Post by [deleted] »

theropost wrote: post #31
cyberax wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The US has globalized away its maritime industry It hasn't. Jones Act _protects_ the US maritime industry, so it stagnated and died. Nobody wants the US ships unless they have to use them, they're crap compared to ships from other countries. > and they still can't find builders. That's because shipyards are basically a defense industry subsidiary. So they receive a fixed amount of orders, and it's known for years i…

Yeah, it's a tough pill to swallow but honestly, the workforce as a whole is kinda coddled at this point. Most people don’t even realize they're being paid more than what they're actually worth. Like, we’re not really creating enough value or building enough stuff that justifies what we think we should be getting. The only reason our value holds up right now is probably cuz of the defense industry flexing its muscle…

[deleted]

Re: Why the U.S. can't build icebreaking ships

#200

Post by wmoxam »

cgh wrote: post #136
mmooss wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes; I meant that Finland has a pretty good relationship with the US; I didn't say anything about Canada and NATO.

My mistake, sorry. I thought you were implying Canada wasn't a NATO member. I agree with your economic nationalism comments. But Canada is in a special position here: the US Arctic is contiguous with Canada's much larger Arctic region and a US/Canada icebreaking partnership seems to make sense. The US nationalists might be okay with it because of NAFTA, generally close economic ties and the whole "fortress North Amer…

Canada and the US have some disagreements about the arctic, particularly about the Northwest Passage: https://brownpoliticalreview.org/2020/04/the-u-s-canada-nort...

That's got to be a factor here

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