Why America can’t build them. Apparently it’s not a new problem. But at least Elon is building a spaceshipyard.
3 thoughts on “Ships”
I have seen this mentioned in many articles over the last 30 years. They never seem to admit the solution to the basic cost of American labor is to displace it, … in the current case, with Robots. This was hinted at in the article, but never stated outright. One of the 2 comments to this article stated it much more clearly.
All the reorganizing and block-building in the world is not going to change the need that American Labor work for as much, or as little, as elsewhere. The possible first use of Optimus Robots on a large scale may well be in Shipyards.
I think that can’t should be read as some combination of don’t, won’t and see no way to make a profit with can’t somewhere at the tail end. To be sure, building a shipyard or even enlarging an existing shipyard to build the largest ships would need a huge investment. All to compete against substantially subsidized foreign yards. It’s hard to imagine how you’d go about raising that kind of money and even harder to imagine any government program producing anything but disaster.
A couple of points. The decline in shipbuilding and ocean shipping dating from the Civil War more or less inversely mirrors the development of domestic, overland transportation, first the railroads, then the hiway system. The clipper ships were just transporting cargo from one part of the country to another after all. They became uneconomic the minute that spike was driven at Promontory Point. Steam ships, especially the early ones, needed frequent refueling. At the same time, America was considerably in advance technologically in ship building and propulsion in terms of naval ships. We did pretty much miss the boat in terms of large, low speed diesel engines though.
Still, the rest of the world, outside of China, Japan and Korea are largely in the same position with almost all of that capacity concentrated in that one small area and with China’s intentions increasingly unpredictable. Korea and Japan are a lot closer to China than to any of their allies.
I have seen this mentioned in many articles over the last 30 years. They never seem to admit the solution to the basic cost of American labor is to displace it, … in the current case, with Robots. This was hinted at in the article, but never stated outright. One of the 2 comments to this article stated it much more clearly.
All the reorganizing and block-building in the world is not going to change the need that American Labor work for as much, or as little, as elsewhere. The possible first use of Optimus Robots on a large scale may well be in Shipyards.
Unionism
and Environmental Protection laws have driven the last nail in
I think that can’t should be read as some combination of don’t, won’t and see no way to make a profit with can’t somewhere at the tail end. To be sure, building a shipyard or even enlarging an existing shipyard to build the largest ships would need a huge investment. All to compete against substantially subsidized foreign yards. It’s hard to imagine how you’d go about raising that kind of money and even harder to imagine any government program producing anything but disaster.
A couple of points. The decline in shipbuilding and ocean shipping dating from the Civil War more or less inversely mirrors the development of domestic, overland transportation, first the railroads, then the hiway system. The clipper ships were just transporting cargo from one part of the country to another after all. They became uneconomic the minute that spike was driven at Promontory Point. Steam ships, especially the early ones, needed frequent refueling. At the same time, America was considerably in advance technologically in ship building and propulsion in terms of naval ships. We did pretty much miss the boat in terms of large, low speed diesel engines though.
Still, the rest of the world, outside of China, Japan and Korea are largely in the same position with almost all of that capacity concentrated in that one small area and with China’s intentions increasingly unpredictable. Korea and Japan are a lot closer to China than to any of their allies.