[roenxi]

Environmental, labour, safety and energy are the usual 4 horsemen that I have seen. Just listing a random point from my collection of squeaky-wheel arguments on the topic:

* I frankly don't know how to make it a persuasive message, but my experience in English speaking countries is that it is generally illegal to make mistakes or skimp on quality. That means it is impossible for industries to learn how to do new things. Look at the treatment of Boeing after 2 airplane crashes for example and ask what that would mean for a new company attempting to learn how to operate in the space. With no room to fail, it is a challenge for new companies to succeed. There were even calls to nationalise them which is ... not likely but also not comforting as an investor. It is darn risky to put money into manufacturing spaces with attitudes like that, it is safer to go with cat picture delivery platforms.

* The US has particulate air pollution that is half of South Korea's and a quarter of China. It is a pretty reasonable guess that air pollution would be mostly industrial production that the US would shut down for environmental concerns.

* US labour laws are an impediment. That new fab plant that TSMC was trying to build in the US seemed to be falling over because it was illegal to use skilled, experienced labour.

* The US is seeing declines in per-capita energy availability and flat actual production. That is almost certainly a policy choice linked to anti-fossil-fuel ideologies, Asia has been seeing seeing crazy growth. It is hard to do energy-intensive activities like manufacturing in an environment where securing energy is a battle.

There have been something like 50 years of anti-industrial policy in the west. A lot of the capital was built in China/Asia. It should be a literal embarrassment that we're being outdone at capitalism by nominal communists and legitimate authoritarians.

[Aloha]

Boeing wrote most of the book on how to do this stuff safely - they just stopped following that book once they bought MDC and its management took over (and arguable laid off the engineering people at MDC who could do it the MDC way safely).

Thats why Boeing is trying to undo it, and repurchase Spirit Aerosystems.

[roenxi]

Note the past-tense in that opening though. The aircraft industry moved from a less-safe state to a more-safe state, then less-safe states were banned.

This raises the question of how feasible it'd be to build new companies. The way that is proven to work (start less safe, then ratchet up standards) is no longer possible because the start of the path has been made illegal. The people who are outcompeting the US are not doing it by starting at the low end and working up.

[Aloha]

There is absolutely no reason why you couldn't meet the accepted safety standards for this industry as a startup.

[roenxi]

There is an excellent reason; startups generally have no idea what they are doing and are very sloppy compared to an established company. Not only that, but they have to be trying to do things differently - otherwise there was no point starting a new company.

Those two factors add up to unsafe practices. It is likely enough that it needs to be factored into investment plans.

[Aloha]

In aviation specifically the standards and practices for the industry are widely available (start with the public domain retrospectives from Project Apollo).

I'm going to note that SpaceX does not seem to be struggling beyond what I would expect to develop a new heavy lift system. Yes, lots of RUD moments, but not an unexpected amount.

I actually agree with you in broad terms, we do have too much hard to follow regulation - but Aviation isn't one of those cases - every rule we have in that sector was paid for in lives.

[roenxi]

> In aviation specifically the standards and practices for the industry are widely available (start with the public domain retrospectives from Project Apollo).

Startup chaos has never been about documentation not being available. There is an almost infinite amount of useful and relevant material that the average startup ignores.

> SpaceX does not seem to be struggling beyond what I would expect to develop a new heavy lift system.

Exactly. We expect some rockets to explode and some rockets did indeed explode. They aren't the safest machines on the planet. If SpaceX was expected to have no exploding rockets, they wouldn't be able to operate their business.

> I actually agree with you in broad terms, we do have too much hard to follow regulation - but Aviation isn't one of those cases - every rule we have in that sector was paid for in lives.

I counter-agree, but ... spending lives is acceptable. We already accept it in all sorts of fields for more trivial things than aerospatial success. If people dying is unacceptable, it is literally impossible to run a civilisation; we don't know how to do mining, forestry and construction without the occasional death. And the first thing that'd go is people doing deliveries on motorcycles, where we have this mysterious tolerance for risk.

We should have consistent standards, not randomly high standards for aerospace. It is bizarre that people can just accept someone getting on a motorbike but it is controversial for Boeing to exist as an independently managed company after around 2x plane crashes.

[pmontra]

Capitalism is not at odds with authoritarianism. They are orthogonal. The only thing capitalists must not do in those places is piss off the dear liders of their country.

[roenxi]

Yeah. How could the Chinese out-capital the US if capitalism was at odds with authoritarianism?

But unless it adopts some really stupid ideologies a liberal system should be able to produce more and better capitalists than an authoritarian one. Free markets breed capitalists like dropped donuts attract ants. It isn't like China is getting the best value out of their billion-odd people; the inefficiencies caused by over-centralisation there are still breathtaking and tragic.

[anonymous-panda]

> Look at the treatment of Boeing after 2 airplane crashes for example

Well, Boeing was taken to task not for trying to innovate and making mistakes but for lying (fraud) and regulatory capture of the FAA (something a smaller competitor can’t do and in fact likely prevents smaller competitors). As an investor, the former should make you wary and as a flier the latter should make you scared.

> The US has particulate air pollution that is half of South Korea's and a quarter of China. It is a pretty reasonable guess that air pollution would be mostly industrial production that the US would shut down for environmental concerns.

Considering the primary stated motivator by many industrial companies for outsourcing to China was labor costs and not environmental regulations, I wouldn’t be so confident in this claim. This is borne out by research which tries to compare environmental regulations across regulatory regimes:

> In our newest research, we compared risk regulation in China and the United States, and we have also found a more complex pattern that does not support the longstanding conventional view of U.S. regulation being much more stringent than in China.

https://www.theregreview.org/2021/12/20/xu-wiener-comparing-...

> * US labour laws are an impediment. That new fab plant that TSMC was trying to build in the US seemed to be falling over because it was illegal to use skilled, experienced labour.

I don’t know what you’re referring to but generally the problems with such endeavors are that skilled work in a different cultural and regulatory environment is challenging and this applies to European companies trying to enter the US market and US companies trying to enter other markets for the first time too, especially when it comes to complex technical projects. Also, the primary labor laws that tend to be an impediment are things like worker safety and compensation. The latter is a bit less important for highly skilled labor but safety is certainly not. I think the bigger problem is trade arrangements that have long ignored these rather than estimating the cost worker safety regulations impose and taxing products from regimes that don’t have good regulations.

> The US is seeing declines in per-capita energy availability and flat actual production. That is almost certainly a policy choice linked to anti-fossil-fuel ideologies, Asia has been seeing seeing crazy growth. It is hard to do energy-intensive activities like manufacturing in an environment where securing energy is a battle.

That seems like a leap when China is installing a lot of nuclear and solar energy. Yes they’re also still building coal plants but that’s intended to be as a backstop for solar until they build enough nuclear capacity.

> It should be a literal embarrassment that we're being outdone at capitalism by nominal communists

China hasn’t really been a communist country in anything more than name for quite a while and is actually pretty capitalist despite their own claims to the contrary (they still like to pretend): https://www.cato.org/policy-report/january/february-2013/how...

You seem to like to state something that may be true but jump to a conclusion without any supporting evidence for making that claim. I’ve noticed Tucker Carlson does the same thing (at least on the Lex Friedman interview as I generally find him an insufferable blowhard) and it’s quite annoying.

[roenxi]

1. But the reason US labour costs are higher is because the US has a legislated minimum wage that is much higher than any equivalent the Chinese have. The US has a massive population of poor people that could otherwise have been employed at the same rate as the Chinese.

One of the explicit points of minimum wage laws is that they prevent Chinese-style sweatshops. People bring that up less these days though since those sweatshops ended up bringing wealth to China.

2. If you pick one of the studies linked in that article, you'll see that Xu & Wiener conclude "the US written rules were more stringent for risks of toxic chemicals and most air pollutants, whereas China's written rules were more stringent for risks in agriculture" [0]. I think that supports my theory that US particulate air pollution is lower because of environmental regulation.

3.

> That seems like a leap when China is installing a lot of nuclear and solar energy. Yes they’re also still building coal plants but that’s intended to be as a backstop for solar until they build enough nuclear capacity.

The US has effectively banned nuclear power, so we're still talking ideology for that one. The vast, vast majority of China's energy comes from fossil fuels [1].

4.

> I’ve noticed Tucker Carlson does the same thing...

I don't know why you're criticising style but leaping straight to someone who is highly successful in his field as a comparison, but sure. If only millions of people would take my opinions seriously!

[0] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/risa.13797

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/energy/country/china