Canada has the same problem with building icebreakers.

The problem with icebreakers capable of dealing with multi-year ice is that they're a very expensive and specialized kind of ship that's hard to construct, but also the sort of ship that has a very long lifetime. Only a few governments in the world have any need of such ships, and they typically only need a few in the span of many decades.

By the time Canada got around to looking for new icebreakers, not a single shipyard in the country had made one in many decades. Ordering a ship from someplace foreign that had actually made one recently would be cheaper than trying to make one domestically. However, then shipyards that haven't made an icebreaker for twenty years would become shipyards that haven't made one for forty years.

It really would make a lot of sense for close allies like Canada and the U.S. to collaborate on building icebreakers.

Curious why the US does not think this is a big problem. I mean, look at the US 80 years ago. The US easily out produced the Axis. We could produce faster and cheaper. There's really no excuse that the cost of making canon shells is 10x higher than Russia. Isn't being able to manufacturing cheaply the signature of a highly developed society? Besides, expertise is not just volumes of blueprints, right? We can only keep our expertise by actively doing. If the next war breaks out, how would the US win? By sending armies of lawyers and coders?

>woefully uncompetitive. They produce single-digit numbers of commercial oceangoing ships annually, at 2-4x the cost of elsewhere

unions and pro union legislation makes US shipbuilding uncompetitive. it also ruins US merchant marine. We could encourage it, but the world market is fairly competitive so we don't really need to, except for defense.

The question was, is it uncompetitive because self-imposed requirements/limtiations are stricter or because of lack of competence. You are answering something else

The same industry is currently crying they can't people to work the shipbuilding jobs. Heh

Recently OpenAI is failing to compete with Google's hardware and has asked US government for 5Gigawatt data center.

> Labor is much more expensive in the US than elsewhere. That is the overwhelming burden in every industry

This is true. But it’s not the root cause for our shipbuilding problems. Our dockworkers and shipbuilders are uniquely inefficient.

I’m not sure labor costs could explain the difference the supposedly 5x difference in cost between Finland and the US. Labor is only a fraction of the overall cost and the difference is not that huge (e.g. average wage is $63k vs $50k).

It’s more likely that US workers (in this sector) expect to get paid $100k to produce $20k of value (relative to other countries)

Ships are useful for more than combat. Even icebreakers.

Having your own manufacturing and industrial base is also very, very important from a geopolitical perspective. (as european countries have come to realise after the invasion of ukraine).

you need your own industrial base to manufacture and develop the machinery you need to defend and project hard and soft power across the globe. Globalisation was supposed to "solve this issue" by making economies so interconnected that this would be no longer needed.

Sadly, we have learned that that simply does not hold up.

> It doesn’t have to be that way, and phrased a little more benevolent, economic sovereignty is a good thing. It’s for that reason the EU has invested a lot of money into Galileo instead of just using GPS. Or look at the Ariane rocket program.

You haven't established that it's a 'good thing', but it does exist. I don't suppose Galileo is about economic sovereignty as much as strategic military independence. Modern militaries require satellite PNT systems - they are necessary to precision munitions, without which your military operates on a 1980s level. As close as the EU-US military relationship is, they perhaps don't want to give the POTUS a button to shut down, e.g., a French military operation. The POTUS might like Galileo too - they might not want the pressure to use that power. (I'll skip having another HN SpaceX discussion!)

> it creates a lot of jobs and distributes wealth throughout the union

Or it just shifts money and jobs from all people - the taxpayers (including businesses) - to a few, the ones that get those jobs and especially the business owners. It's arguably better to just give people the money and have them do something they can do efficiently. It's make-work welfare, in a way.

Finland is a NATO ally; but sure Canada makes sense too. And Norway and Sweden and whoever else might have the skills and experience.

> they never have an answer to what do you do when China controls every supply chain and then decides to bulldoze Taiwan and we then go to war with them? All the market advantages and globalism in the world goes out the window and you can't do much more than capitulate to a bully.

That was a complaint many years go, but things have changed dramatically: The US now is 'decoupling' its economy from China, and moving production to friendlier countries, and the US encourages and arranges for allies to do the same. The US and its Pacific allies are also intensely preparing for possible warfare with China.

Just because China is not a reliable partner doesn't mean the US should throw out all other partners. Should the US not buy icebreakers from Canada and Finland because of China? That would be greatly hamstrining the US. China's government would love it, I think.

Presumably you need to monitor the situation and require that there's a significant enough amount of interdependence.

The issue with China is that they don't need the US as much as the US needs them.

Who ever said that nationalism is a good thing, apart from nationalists?

“Nationalism is an infantile disease, it’s the measles of mankind.”

-Albert Einstein

It is strategically critical to maintain friendly relations with Finland, Canada, and South Korea, all of which would be happy to sell icebreakers. If those countries were to become unreliable, the US will have problems a whole lot than a shortage of icebreakers.

Yes, I meant economic logic. I updated my comment, thanks.

We can change the law. It happens every day.

"The culprit here isn’t the Jones Act, but another protectionist shipbuilding law that requires Naval and Coast Guard ships to be built in U.S. shipyards. It’s possible to waive this requirement via presidential authorization[0], but there hasn’t appeared to be much interest in this."

[0] https://sixtydegreesnorth.substack.com/p/yes-the-us-coast-gu...

"In practice Congress would need to support such a plan by appropriating funds for the project."

> The shipyards are also unionized to hell and back, with VERY cushy contracts.

The problem here isn't the unions, it's the fact that we privatized building ships. It's yet another example that privatizing all parts of the government is a fundamentally bad idea. Government goals do not align with private industry goals and private industry, particularly in a well captured market like defense and ship building, gets to command insane prices because they know the US will pony up.

The reason the US was able to make advanced navy ships right up until the 80s is because shipbuilding was done by public industry. Insanely, Clinton and Reagan started the process of privatizing our fleet capabilities and it's landed us exactly where you think it would.

The reason we don't have ice breaker ships being built is because it's a niche market and ship builders are all too happy to say "no" or to charge an exorbitant price so the US military will go away.

The Jones Act only protects a very small part of US shipbuilding industry, those ships which will be used to ship goods between US ports.

Somehow the magical thinking here is that, if you allowed everyone to buy ships from anywhere they would buy more American made ships but because it is mandated that you buy American made ships for certain tasks, suddenly the industry is noncompetitive.

The reality of the situation is that the Jones Act is the only thing keeping the last vestigial of the shipbuilding industry alive. There are some inefficiencies in the industry it's self but for the most part, the primary drivers for the increased costs were related to the regulatory environment of the US(environmental, worker protection, etc), now there are even greater costs due to network effects of related industries having shrunk or died out.

Similar to posts about machine tools or electronic design, everyone talks about how in China its so much easier to get stuff done because the Fab shops are all next door and nothing like that exists in the US, you used to have more steel mills, fabricators and machine shops. Now there are fewer and further apart.

Network effects matter.

I can assure you, shipyards here in Finland are just as, if not more, unionized.

Unionized workers can be hired on a temporary basis. By cushy contracts this means that the amount of wealth extraction from workers is not as great as it is in other American industries.

Isn't it a similar case with the American busses? They are crap because they're protected?

Similar with Boeing too.

What’s the general consensus on the state of US Navy ships?

The most recent classes seem riddled with various problems - see Zumwalt, LCS, Constellation. I suppose the Ford is relatively ok.

Yeah, it's a tough pill to swallow but honestly, the workforce as a whole is kinda coddled at this point. Most people don’t even realize they're being paid more than what they're actually worth. Like, we’re not really creating enough value or building enough stuff that justifies what we think we should be getting. The only reason our value holds up right now is probably cuz of the defense industry flexing its muscle to keep things stable.

But let’s be real, as other countries rise up and we start losing our grip as the top dog, we're gonna feel the pain. It could be a slow burn or maybe a faster crash, but either way, it's gonna suck. We’re gonna have to go through some serious hardship to get back to where we think we should be. Not based on what we think we deserve, but what we actually do.

And it’s kinda mixed messaging too, right? We somehow believe our labor is more valuable than others, but at the end of the day, it’s gonna come down to working harder. Longer hours, more back-breaking labor, real work, not just sitting in an office chair all day. We’re not entitled to cushy jobs forever, and things are gonna get a lot harder before they get better.

What do you think globalizing means? Ships are too expensive to be built to a given level of quality in the US. This means we outsource the expertise, and in this case, even the expertise necessary to tell what a good deal is.

They've created a market in which a US based company cannot compete economically, because the cost of production elsewhere will be less. There is no margin by which any competition can take place, whether or not the government throws a ton of money and stopgap incentives into the mix.

You can't manufacture chips, small household goods, general purpose clothing, electronics, or a whole slew of other things in the US because our legal regime fundamentally disallows any American participation in those markets through economic disincentivization. If you can't make any profit because you have to pay higher wages or taxes if you manufacture in the US, then you're not going to manufacture in the US, even if you're a patriot.

The US doesn't have a rational system designed to maximize value to citizens, it's a hodgepodge of conflicting regulatory grifts designed to maximally benefit the corporations who paid for the lobby.

> they're crap compared to ships from other countries.

That's exactly what "globalizing" is. You literally cannot, under the current regulatory regime, create a ship building company that can compete with other established interests and competition from other countries. You'd have to relax the arbitrary labor and wage constraints, fix taxes and tariffs for sufficiently long term outlooks that anyone would bother investing. To achieve that, you'd need good faith operators throughout the government willing to rock the boat, and if you think that will ever happen, I've got a bridge in Brooklyn for ya - I'll sell it cheap.

Congress has been pushed not to eliminate would completely wipe out tiny remaining American Merchant Marine fleet. Most people who want to get rid of Jones Act are economists and other types who sole concern is "How much more money can we make from cheap shipping" while ignoring any national security concerns.

We could talk about modify it maybe allowing purchase of specialized ships from overseas friendly countries, like icebreakers from Finland.

People here keep blaming the Jones Act but the US has lost manufacturing capability across so many sectors so I don't really get how shipbuilding would be much better without the Jones Act. (Not that I like the Jones Act, I really don't, I'm just skeptical our shipbuilding would be much better without it. We were screwed either way)

Isn't part of this that US vessels are not competitive on a global market because of taxation?

if you built and registered a ship in the US, wouldn't taxes be much more than say a ship registered in a small tax-advantageous country? (for a ship that basically wasn't in US 99.9% of the time)

Retirees do this with motorhomes - why register in california and pay all those taxes when you will be out of the state traveling all the time. Register in North Dakota or something and still drive the same route. (note taxes could be state income taxes because of residency, or vehicle registration taxes which are a % of vehicle value)

The problem in the US is not just protectionism against other countries, is that it doesn't incentivize internal competition. Instead, the US gov will throw more money at existing big corporations which from that point on have no fear of smaller companies innovating.

Also, the US commercial shipbuilding industry has always been small. WW2 was the exception where built lots of ships mostly in temporary yards. Since WW2, it has struggled. Naval shipbuilding has been the big part.

It is a lot of pain for reset of economy for protecting a small industry. If US wants more naval shipyards, then should incentivize building them. I get the impression that there has been much reason for yards to improve protected from competition.

I don't find this explanation satisfying. If the Jones Act of 1920 is at fault, how do we explain the timeline? The U.S. was a ship-building powerhouse at least through the 50s, if not through the 70s. Why was there a multi-generation lag between the Jones Act and its effects?

“Leading to good commercial results” is definitely not the rationale for the Jones Act.

Passenger rail systems require the procurement of immense amounts of very pricey land, or the transfer of ownership of existing rail lines. I don’t see that as a similar cultural issue.

Boat building can be solved by spending money to build boats (and perhaps waiting a couple decades for expertise to be built up).

Using eminent domain or changing the view of the public on land rights is a much higher barrier.

Have you tried the new Caltrain? It's getting good reviews even from Japanese.

The US doesn't have effective passenger rail systems for the same reason that Europe and Japan don't have effective freight rail systems: you have to optimize for one use case or the other or else have two completely separate systems, which takes up a lot of extra land.

This type of thinking can strike as post-hoc rationalization.

the US need a navy to have a presence in the middle east , and Asia. We are down to the bones for force projection and to secure our own shipping. There is no 'less Naval dependent' way to police the worlds waters - the alternative is to give up.

Which is fine, the USA has been struggling with naval force projection for some time.

What about nuclear powered submarines and aircraft carriers built in Newport News, VA ?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newport_News_Shipbuilding

Which itself is turning into a bit of a disaster in terms of how different they are to the original Italian design...

> And plumbing codes in America require an entire network of ventilation piping that has been deemed largely unnecessary in much of the world.

There’s a lot of surprising info in that article. This one section that I actually have passing knowledge of is just blatantly false. The majority of US states use and heavily contribute to the international plumbing code which allows for single stack ventilation as described in their linked article. My house from 1958 has single stack ventilation…

Sections like that with easily verifiable falsehoods bring the rest of the facts presented by the article into question for me.

Might as well go all in then and equip the ships with the world's best buggy whips.

I like free markets. I just don't like that China is eating the West's lunch. They just seem better at playing the "free markets" game than anyone on this side of the globe and I think the USA is doubling down on the ideas that defined it in the 1970's, rather than saying— "it's a new world, let's see what we can learn from it to up our game".

China has definitely learned plenty from the world, and fundamentally changed the way it does things from 1970 to today. Deng Xiaoping in the 80s marks a stark ideological change that transformed China to the core. Who is the last US president one can say that of?