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Ha, we gutted our manufacturing base, so if we bring it back it will now be state of the art! Not sure if that will work out for us, but hey their is some precedence.

by kelseyfrog5 hours ago|

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The dollar became the world's reserve currency because the idea of Bancor lost to it. Thus subjecting the US to the Triffin dilemma which made the US capital markets benefit at the expense of a hugely underappreciated incentive to offshore manufacturing.

You can't onshore manufacturing and have a dollar reserve currency. The only question then is, Are you willing to de-dollarize to bring back manufacturing jobs?

This isn't a rhetorical question if the answer is yes, great, let's get moving. But if the answer is no, sorry, dollarization and its effects will continue to persist.

by jacquesm6 hours ago|

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This is the silver lining in many bad stories: the pendulum will always keep on swinging because at the extremes the advantage flips.

by hansvm4 hours ago|

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I'll take a look at that story later. I'm curious though, why is US metallurgy consistently top-notch if the processes are inferior? When I use wrenches, bicycle frames, etc from most other countries I have no end of troubles with weld delamination, stress fractures compounding into catastrophic failures, and whatnot, even including enormous wrenches just snapping in half with forces far below what something a tenth the size with American steel could handle.

by jacquesm3 hours ago|

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> I'm curious though, why is US metallurgy consistently top-notch if the processes are inferior?

I really wonder what you're comparing with.

Try some quality surgical steel from Sweden, Japan or Germany and you'll come away impressed. China is still not quite there but they are improving rapidly, Korea is already there and poised to improve further.

Metal buyers all over the globe are turning away from the US because of the effects of the silly tariffs but they were not going there because the quality, but because of the price.

The US could easily catch up if they wanted to but the domestic market just isn't large enough.

And as for actual metallurgy knowledge I think russia still has an edge, they always were good when it came down to materials science, though they're sacrificing all of that now for very little gain.

by PaulHoule1 hours ago|

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Also those old open hearth furnaces are long gone, see

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHnJp0oyOxs

There are people making top quality steel in the US today by modern methods but it wasn't like the new replaced the old, the old mostly disappeared and we got a little bit of the new.

by jacquesm1 hours ago|

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Yes, I should have been more clear there: they could catch up in volume but it will require a different mindset if they want to become a net exporter of such items.

by gsf_emergency_618 minutes ago|

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To add a meta contribution to yours using anecdotes:

US pipeline for metallurgical R&D broken (by financial/cultural incentives)

This guy studied metallurgy in Carleton U, Canada, switched to CS, founded YC, emotionalized the decision

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39600555

Who knows, he might have become John Carmack's John Carmack, building rockets better than Carmack or Elon

by jacquesm13 minutes ago|

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And yet, it could be done, I'm pretty sure of that.

by nine_k4 hours ago|

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Which are these other countries? Have you tried something actually made in Japan, or in Germany, for instance?

What you describe seems like very cheap Chinese imports fraudulently imitating something else.