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Comment by kjkjadksj | Hacker News Reader

China is a paper tiger. It is amazing the credit the media gives them, but no surprise given the medias purpose is to create narratives rather than put light on truth. If China were as dominant as the media alleges Taiwan would have been invaded decades ago. The reality is big mighty China has one aircraft carrier that entered service just 5 years ago, and another one that is a renovated old soviet carrier. The vast bulk of their air force is a half century behind ours. Most other industries are similarly toothless when you dig into how they are actually comprised beyond their raw numbers.

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I'm not talking about China alone. I'm talking about Asia. Which is China + Taiwan + Korea + Japan + Singapore, plus every major asian country.

Additionally the rivalry between the US and China is off topic I'm not talking about that.

My statement is, Asia is superior to the US in terms of Manufacturing/infrastructure. I can add more to that as well. In terms of ICs, Asia also dominates. The US is behind Asia on all three of these fronts. As a general statement this is still true. You didn't invalidate anything with your off topic comment here.

That being said, the united states is the dominant spender in terms of defense. They are number one on this front and in terms of technology. I don't think the world has ever seen a military industrial complex as massive and as advanced as the one the US has built. What you say here is true and it's major. It's not included in "manufacturing" but it's intimately connected and thus worth mentioning.

Why do you compare an entire continent to one country and also not count one of that country’s largest manufacturing cost centers as part of its manufacturing? Seems like cherry-picking.

Because at one point in time the US played the dominant role here, with output comparable to entire continents. Now with globalization that dominance has shifted to Asia.

So in essence if there is a place that will convert to majority nuclear power it's most likely going to be Asia that still has the capability to do this. I don't think it's likely for the US.

US still has the capability for sure. Look at this environment in this country. Most every consumer good produced imported here without having to bear the externalities of local manufacturing or resource extraction like localized pollution and diminished health outcomes. Most money is kept or invested here. Most of the world is trying to immigrate here. Realistically if push came to shove this is exactly where you’d expect a massive buildout to occur. Supply of materials is solved with massive globalized trade networks oriented towards ports in NY and CA. Supply of money is solved from both private investors and also the strings the federal reserve can uniquely pull. Supply of labor is also solved considering how much low skilled labor is available in central and south America that is able to be drawn upon in probably a years time or much less if such job opportunities present themselves. There is also a lot of low skilled labor in this country already kept idle, working service jobs like cashiers in towns that have little other work but such service jobs, in effect the town exists and demands labor yet produces nothing, and these sorts of places were ripe for building out defense industries in record time in the 1940s. We import skilled labor and knowledge workers from most other countries who struggle to offer them lifelong work locally.

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