81–90 of 148 posts
It seems nice but I don't think it matters at this point to wave the nationalist flag when it's only a half-measure forgetting the 500 kg gorilla in the room. Where are nearly all the closed-source designs, manufacturing, and firmwares for the chips made? And, absolutely no chances of backdoors there, right?
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To your point on production capacity: This reminds me of pushback in the early days of Tesla. Sure they can build 1,000, but can they build 10,000. Now we’re at “sure they can build 500,000, but can they build 5M.” I think the answers “yes”, if the demand is there. And I agree with you that industrial policy could help jumpstart that demand.
> I think the answers “yes”, if the demand is there. It's not a question of demand. A negligible number of customers care where their product is manufactured. They care only about price, which is why manufacturing moved overseas in the first place. What is needed to manufacture phones in the West is protectionism and mercantilism. Our governments would have to subsidize domestically manufactured products, require the…
I was under the impression that most of the money saved that way went straight into the companies' (offshore) accounts and CXO's pockets.
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Ah, what is a "bad" price for an massively underwhelming piece of hardware, in your book, then?
Come on, the Purism people have put up a huge effort. You can't just casually the product "massively underwhelming" without stating your reasons for doing so.
I applaud this accomplishment. I think there will be a push to manufacture more semiconductor-intensive products in the US over the next several years as tensions with China continue to heat up and Taiwan is left as a single point of failure. I know progress is already being made with TSMC building new fabs in the US. I will note that Purism do not say what their production capacity is, and that it would probably be…
In the past 10 years, it became cheaper to buy the same products from China than the US, which is in part due to US shipping companies (DHL, UPS, FedEx) dramatically scaling down their overseas shipping business.
I could get a 5KG box of electronics in a week for $50 ten years ago. Nowadays, there's only USPS, it takes two weeks and still costs more. Kinda sad.
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> It's politically unpopular for the same reason action on climate change is unpopular: it makes everything more expensive. You've got this backwards. Both taking action on climate change and buying American are popular [1][2]. Furthermore I don't know of much evidence that suggests taking action on climate change will raise prices. But you are right about protectionism in that way. That's the biggest problem here. I…
Of course everyone wants the government to do something about climate change. They're not thinking about what they'll have to sacrifice in order to make it happen. Almost no one is willing to suffer even minor inconvenience in favor of stopping climate change. Let's see the results of a poll that asks if people would be willing to take climate action that doubled the price of airline tickets, or that doubled the pric…
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> It's politically unpopular for the same reason action on climate change is unpopular: it makes everything more expensive. You've got this backwards. Both taking action on climate change and buying American are popular [1][2]. Furthermore I don't know of much evidence that suggests taking action on climate change will raise prices. But you are right about protectionism in that way. That's the biggest problem here. I…
Of course everyone wants the government to do something about climate change. They're not thinking about what they'll have to sacrifice in order to make it happen. Almost no one is willing to suffer even minor inconvenience in favor of stopping climate change. Let's see the results of a poll that asks if people would be willing to take climate action that doubled the price of airline tickets, or that doubled the pric…
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I find binning fascinating when this topic comes up. You start with a pile of 1 cent parts with a 10% tolerance, go through it and measure each and every one, and you magically end up with bins of 1% tolerance parts that now cost a dollar. The parts didn't change at all! And yet merely the fact that they are sorted gives them so much more value.
Another interesting story is that in the 50s and 60s, light aircraft shared a lot of accessory parts with cars of the era. Cessna used the same voltage regulator as Ford. Ford accepted statistical process inspection for their parts. Cessna required 100% parts inspection for the exact same part. Solution: run the assembly line for the voltage regulators normally, do the greater of the number of inspections required by…
Yeah it’s 2021 and Chinese manufactured are more reliable and higher quality than anything American made. As an anecdote I build PCBs for a hobby and I’ve purchased PCBs and chips from both cheap Chinese fabs and suppliers as well as Americans ones. The only issues I’ve ever had were with American ones (which were many times more expensive) and I’ve stopped using them completely. I would be curious if librem will eve…
> Also after the Snowden revelations, I laugh at the idea that American made products are somehow more “secure”. Be that may, but as a US person I’d rather have US intelligence snooping on me than a foreign hostile entity. There are no ifs and buts about it. For folks in other countries, I leave it to them if they are more comfortable with a democracy, with relatively good relations with most countries in the world,…