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Comment by systemvoltage | Hacker News Reader

Initially a lot since the entire supply chain is in China/Taiwan/Korea/Japan. Those glue stickies that hold the batteries? Nitto Japan makes them. Lots of small things like that also needs to be brought on shore. Overtime, it can get to a point where it would be maybe 30% more expensive. That number doesn’t ring well with investors. Only government action (which are puppetted by Apple lobbyists) can solve this problem.

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It’s weird that with interest rates at all time lows and huge amounts of money sloshing around looking for something to invest in, it’s all ended up in overpriced houses and NFTs rather than attempting to compete with these overseas manufacturers. Like surely Nitto doesn’t have some indefensible moat around making battery glue?

Also while Congress is up in arms over tech monopolies… why isn’t anyone going after ASML? This is a literal monopoly that’s choking the entire world’s supply of semiconductors. Their patents prevent any competition. The US isn’t shy about taking unilateral action and fucking over entire countries when strategic interests are at hand, why not pull the trigger on a little-known Dutch company that the public doesn’t care about?

Because the purpose of investing one's money is to attempt to preserve wealth. Dumping a bunch of money into a domestic factory with way higher variable costs that are structurally never going to improve is a surefire way to lose money. In contrast housing prices literally only go up and NFTs have non-zero chance at not losing all your money, which is better than a commodity factory in the US.

I think we'll see more onshoring if robotics ever gets to the point where factories can be cheaply fully automated.

"structurally never going to improve" seems to overstate things. Working standards in India and China will eventually improve (China is already pricing itself out of the clothing market). The era of cheap overseas labor will eventually dry up.

I think the bigger problem is that you couldn't invest in such businesses even if you wanted to. Nobody is even bothering to start them. The US still has a lot of advantages - a looser regulatory environment than Europe, less subject to the whims of politics than China/Russia, the best research institutions in the world, and essentially infinite dollars. But all this is to produce a managerial elite that decides it's cheaper to just print money and buy stuff elsewhere.

I don't think cheap overseas labor will dry up for at least another 30-50 years. There is still all of Africa for factory owners to exploit and underpay. And most of Southeast Asia and parts of Central Asia.

> managerial elite that decides it's cheaper to just print money and buy stuff elsewhere

Hah, that doesn't even begin to touch the moronic stuff that gets taught in b-schools.

The entire point of patents is to give companies a monopoly for a period of time in exchange for not keeping the information secret. The utility and merits of the system is certainly not without debate, but if you want the answer as to why governments are okay with it, it's probably because it was their idea.

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