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[Mary in S. Carolina]

This message was self-deleted by its author (Mary in S. Carolina) on Sun Mar 13, 2022, 10:20 PM. When the original post in a discussion thread is self-deleted, the entire discussion thread is automatically locked so new replies cannot be posted.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

1. Not this shit again. Your idea is already exploded in the other thread

https://www.democraticunderground.com/100216460519

[EYESORE 9001]

2. Economies of scale

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_scale
Give this a glance and see if it answers any of your questions.

[dumbcat]

3. I've started a few companies, including a technical consultancy

so I'll call myself one. I'm also an electrical engineer with MBAs in Management and Finance. Now retired.

Yes, we could bring phone manufacturing back to the US. But absolutely not on a small scale. A small company could not sell modern phones made in the US at a profit. If you can't sell your products at a profit your comany doesn't last long.

Modern electronics manufacturing is about scale, not smarts or difficulty. No matter how hard you wish, that's the reality.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

9. That is the answer you were given multiple times over in the other thread. . . . nt

[Bernardo de La Paz]

39. So, you chose money and think that trumps any argument. Nope. And here's the same answer

It was the first post in the other thread. Compare.

1. Anyone who asks "can we start manufacturing phones, etc on a small scale via crowd funding"

... has no idea of the scale of manufacturing that is required to make sophisticated high tech products, and the integrated supply chains involved. I'm not an expert of any kind in that area, but I know it is not from a lack of buildings that it is not being done.

Sure, a crowd funded startup could make a phone three times as heavy as an iPhone and with much less reliability and with no integration into the Apple network / app store. And a price tag twice as high. Sure, within a few years a smart small company could get all of those negatives substantially reduced ... by using supply chains largely rooted in other places, like Apple does.

In any case there are lots of competitors, sophisticated industrial giants, producing phones.

There's a lot more to making phones than repurposing empty buildings. Buildings are the least of worries for smart phone manufacturers.

It's the same answer as you got here

Yes, we could bring phone manufacturing back to the US. But absolutely not on a small scale. A small company could not sell modern phones made in the US at a profit. If you can't sell your products at a profit your comany doesn't last long.

Modern electronics manufacturing is about scale, not smarts or difficulty. No matter how hard you wish, that's the reality.

Again, from the other thread:

2. A factory can't just start cranking out high tech devices like phones overnight

It would take years to setup and doing it small scale would not be remotely profitable. No profit means no one is going to do it. The manufacturing processes for stuff like that is very complex and takes years to spin up from scratch.

15. Do you know how to do either?

They are building a couple of new electronics manufacturing plants near Austin. It takes years and billions of $$$$. One of the biggest problems is bringing in water for the manufacturing plant for the fabrication processes from a hundred miles away. And dealing with the toxic chemical waste from semiconductor manufacturing. Are your "crowd funders" ready to deal with those issues for their re=purposed buildings.

The sentiment is admirable, but reality is real (and expensive.)

26. its actually much harder than brain surgery

semiconductor manufacturing requires more complex facilities, ultra specialized equipment, and even rarer skill sets.

There are good reasons it takes years and billions of dollars to set up a new chip manufacturing facility.

If you are simply talking assembly of finished phones from components manufactured elsewhere, then you would run into a different set of challenges. One is availability of components, another is economies of scale, and the last is competition/cost. An 'assembly' type manufacturing facility would need subsidies to prop it up in perpetuity.

Not saying these are insurmountable, but manufacturing today is far different and more specialized than it was even 20 years ago.

47. {...}
It is not impossible to make phones in the United States. However, it is not something that can be done through crowdsourcing, nor is it something that can just move into an empty building and start shipping phones in a short time. If you had any experience in technology manufacturing, you would not suggest that such a thing was possible.

There's more there too, but this is posted for other people's benefit because you have closed your ears and eyes.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

40. "but I can." So do it. You can't and you won't. . . . nt

[Bernardo de La Paz]

49. You know nothing about me yet you think you know everything about me and manufacturing. . . nt

[Bernardo de La Paz]

55. Here's one example showing you know nothing about high tech manufacturing

"Empty buildings"

"room" is not the problem.

You wrote https://www.democraticunderground.com/100216460519

There are plenty of empty buildings,. I should have said we have plenty of room and technology so why can't we start manufacturing phones, etc on a small scale via crowd funding (investor owned)? Why are we always relying on Corporate America to transfer their manufacturing operations from a foreign country? Why can't we be Corporate America, start small and build from there.Yes, I get the "competitive edge" of cheap labor. However, it appears those benefitting from the cheap labor are the Oligarchs not "we the people".

[Bernardo de La Paz]

50. You can't point to any post that shows jealousy for your self-acclaimed "wealth"

But, of course, that won't stop you from saying that bit of nonsense over and over.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

59. Again you attack the person with bogus statements about them. . . . nt

[USALiberal]

6. Keep asking until you get the answer you want!! LOL

[MineralMan]

7. I have been an entrepreneur since 1974.

I have not received a paycheck as an employee since that year.

I have started up several businesses. One, which is marginally like a manufacturing business, was my small software company, OsoSoft, that I started in 1990. It was successful, but was no Microsoft. Like many small businesses, it was a one-person operation from the beginning. I designed and coded the software. I tested and debugged it. I wrote the user manuals for it. I did all the marketing operations. I produced the finished product, duplicated the disks, printed the manuals, stapled them together, packaged the products and shipped them to my customers. I was the customer support department, as well. I did every single task required to produce, market, sell, and support my products.

My primary products were reviewed in major publications and I sold thousands of copies to end users. It was very good software, indeed, for Windows-based PCs.

My company was successful enough that I carefully considered scaling up the company. I decided not to do that, though. While I enjoyed being a one-person software company, my careful analysis showed me that scaling it up would not result in financial success, due to the high costs of hiring employees, paying for a facility, and shifting every aspect of the company into a larger business. The result would have been more headaches and not more profits.

While that company operated as a one-person company, it generated an average of $50K per year in profit. I liked that. I worked about 20 hours a week on average running it, and did other entrepreneurial things the rest of the time. I wrote articles for one of the largest computer magazines in the country and operated an online retail business that sold mineral specimens to collectors all over the world. Each took about 20 hours per week. So, I made good money through hard, personal work.

So, I am an entrepreneur. Retired now, though. I closed down all of my businesses when I retired.

So, what is your business? Do tell...

[USALiberal]

8. First PC? Mine was a Commodore 64! Nt

[MineralMan]

12. I didn't get a PC until 1984.

I was a writer. I got that first PC clone because I was writing a book of woodworking and other home projects and insisted that the publisher buy me a PC so I wouldn't have to write on an IBM Selectric. The publisher agreed and the entire book was done digitally.

However, I took my first computer programming class in 1963, using FORTRAN and an IBM 1620.

I fell in love with the PC. That book was the end of my woodworking project and home repair article business. I took a year off, based on the proceeds of that book and dove into the world of PCs in the mid-80s. I switched to writing about PCs and software and went from there. I started creating niche software for MS-DOS and switched to programming for Windows as soon as I could. Then, I produced niche applications to fill holes in commercial software availability. At the same time, I wrote reviews and columns for computer magazines, based on what I had learned. The combination of writing and tech knowledge served me very well for many years.

[USALiberal]

36. My first computer class used the IBM 1620 in high school....

My senior year we had an IBM 360/30!

I thought you also wrote for compute magazine?
I think we talked before about a Visual basic review.

[MineralMan]

43. Yes, I did write for Compute!

Also for PC World, for many years, as a contributing editor.

I used Visual Basic for all of my Windows apps. Prior to Windows, I programmed in QuickBasic, a compiled Basic program.

I loved Basic. It was a language that I understood as well as English, really. Visual Basic made it easy to design user interfaces, and Windows was based on an interface user action concept. So, you could draw up an interface and then use Basic to program what the application should do when the user did something on the interface. It was an easy system to understand and Basic is easy to code in, or was for me.

It was like the interface was a big program loop, just waiting for the user to do something. Click here and a coded routine would do something connected with that interface object.

There were lots of tricky ways you could leverage those interface objects. For example, you could sort a list in a VB List box instantly and invisibly. You'd just make the List box invisible, do the sort, which was just a flag on the List box, and magically make it visible again, all sorted. In fact, you could duplicate the list box virtually, do the sort and then switch visible and invisible boxes without the user even being aware. There was no need do code a sorting routine.

Another cool thing you could do was create matrix string variables linked to those list boxes. One of my applications had a simple database in it. All fields in the database were stored in memory as matrix variables, so operations on the database were all done in invisible text boxes, out of sight and with minimal coding requirements. So, sorting the entire database could be coded by sorting the matrices for the list boxes and then making them visible after the sort, rather than dealing with a lot of code.

Unorthodox, but highly functional and fast.

I used short-cut trickery to do a lot of things in my applications, including graphical animations and positioning and printing graphics, which had no actual method to do that internal to the Visual Basic program. As I figured those tricks out, I used to share source code on Visual Basic forums to show others how to do things you weren't supposed to be able to do in Visual Basic.

The graphics animation subroutine, for example, required code that ran during initial program loading that measured the speed of the processor, since the Visual Basic timing tools weren't finely-grained enough. The speed routine provided a number matched to .01 seconds of the processor timing that could be used in an empty loop to provide a precise delay. Then, all you had to do was to load all of the animation images into a stack of invisible graphics boxes, and then cycle through the animation by making the appropriate image box visible in sequence, using an empty loop based on a multiple of that timing number to delay the animation loop process. A kludge? Absolutely, but it worked perfectly, and only required a few lines of code. Why did I do that? Because the opening splash screen in all of my apps had a winking teddy bear image that was the OsoSoft company logo. "Oso" is Spanish for "bear." Hilarious stuff.

[USALiberal]

51. That is really very interesting.....

Brings back a lot of fun memories.


I talked to Bill Gates one time for 3 or 4 minutes at a comdex in Vegas. I was on the beta of visual basic I think they named it rawhide at the time.

Being a computer nerd was meaning that I was so happy seeing Bill Gates in person

[MineralMan]

58. Yeah, I met Bill Gates a couple of times, too.

He didn't like me very much. I did a fully functional parody of Microsoft Bob. It was a Windows Shell, just like Bob, but was called "Bubba." I published it as freeware in 1995, not long after Bob appeared. It was a joke, but ended up going viral. I learned soon after I released it that it was running as a Windows shell on many PCs at the Microsoft campus.

That parody almost cost me my job at PC World. I kept my job, though. My best and most successful prank ever! All done in Visual Basic, of course.

The funniest thing about Bubba was that it took me less than 24 hours to code the software. My brother in law designed the artwork for the interface in about 12 hours. I launched it at COMDEX the year Bob came out and distributed about 400 3.5" floppies containing Bubba to computer media people at COMDEX. On my office wall hangs the feature story about Bubba, complete with a color screen shot, that ran in the San Jose Mercury News. The article title is, "Bubba meets Microsoft. Bob, you ain't gonna like this."

Fun times!

[USALiberal]

60. That is a great story. I do really miss those early days.

[MineralMan]

62. Yes, I miss them too. It was an exciting time,

and we were right in the middle of it. Now, PCs are just commodities and tools. Then, though, it was wonderful to be part of something new.

But, even in the DOS days, there was lots of exciting stuff to do. I wrote for "Computer Shopper" for a while. One of the articles I did was a multi-page guide to using DOS Batch Files. One of the most popular things I ever wrote about MS-DOS PCs. If you read that article, and learned what was in it, there was a lot you could do to customize your basic PC.

That's what I was all about, really - showing people stuff about PCs that they wouldn't discover on their own.

[dumbcat]

45. Damn! Another FORTRAN on an IBM 1620 alumni

here! Moved on the FORTRAN IV on the IBM 360 in college in the late 60's.

[MineralMan]

47. Ha! So, there we were, pioneering back in the 60s.

Love it!

[USALiberal]

52. I Remember to 1620 had sense Switches. You could code to see their status.

[MineralMan]

14. OK.

You're the one claiming to be a rich, successful entrepreneur.

It's your thread.

[we can do it]

23. In her head - I thought you said😂

: roll: : roll: : roll: : roll: : roll: : roll: : roll: : roll:

[we can do it]

31. Still female, live downtown Rehoboth Beach

Paid off..Check the price of in town Rehoboth Beach real estate and get back to me about that jealousy thingy….

[we can do it]

33. You first. I can walk by President Biden's house in half hour.

It’s drizzling right now. There are 5 people working at Rehoboth Ave Starbucks right now- call them.

[we can do it]

38. Downtown Rehoboth, not 19971 zip. Reading for comprehension.

In town. Not a condo…..I will wait.

[we can do it]

42. Zillow is a crap site that rips off realtors.

Nothing in downtown Reho- under 1.5 million. 19971 zip goes way beyond city limits, multiple trailer parks etc.

[we can do it]

54. People who live here know the difference.

There is quite a difference - east of route 1 and east of canal.

https://sellingdelawarehomes.com/search-delaware-home-for-sale?quicksrch=1&pcity=in-town-rehoboth


Please proceed.

[dumbcat]

29. Will you tell us if your businesses

involve complex manufacturing technology? Do you manufacture any electronic circuit boards? Chips?

Or do you manufacture something like kewpie dolls on Etsy?

Can you at least tell us what line of business in which you are an entrepreneur?

[lagomorph777]

21. I've run a couple of similar one-man software or web operations

(about 20 years apart). Meanwhile, I've been an electrical engineer in various industry segments, including some pretty high tech stuff, and some manufacturing operations.

I do believe Americans can manufacture anything we want to, if it's financially viable. In the case of phones, that means large scale. In the case of sophisticated military electronics, the financial incentives are completely different; it can be done at smaller scale.

Making phones in a backyard workshop is not remotely realistic.

[MineralMan]

28. Exactly. Competing with large manufacturers with factories

overseas for popular consumer products is just not something that can succeed as a start-up business.

Competing on price in the consumer cell phone market is just not possible using domestic manufacturing. If it were, people would be doing it, given the massive quantity of such devices that are sold.

I can't remember the name of the start-up company that was planning to introduce a new US-made phone a few years ago. Lots of start-up flash, but no phones were ever on the market from that company. It was an impossible dream.

[WA-03 Democrat]

10. I have worked in electronic contract manufacturing for 25 years

Motorola tried building phones here and failed in Fort Worth Texas in 2008 and it failed with Flex doing the actual build. Flex is tax registered in Singapore but all executive management is in the US and is second only to Foxconn in terms of size. The Flex Austin site is world class but the products it builds are more complicated electronically but the volume is hundreds rather than millions per year. There is a huge step function between these two manufacturing operations and modes. Sites that build cellphones have 200,000 workers living in dorms and working 7 days a week and are paid (fully burdened) $5-$7 per hour with OT at time and a half.

The reason it will not work is the complexities, volume, cost, logistics and manufacturing skill are not here or aligned. Electronically, the US has never produced complex high volume electronics. China has been doing so since the early 90s. To copy exact it would take rewriting the labor and environmental laws. No $15 an hour. So you may ask can Mexico do it. No all for the same reasons. We have study and tried this many times and it fails because China is so damn good at it.

[LuckyCharms]

15. Sure, why not?

With enough capital and the right people, we can do anything in the US.

The problem, however, would be scaling the business to be large enough to be competitive, and selling enough units to be profitable.

Additionally, labor would be expensive as compared to other countries, which would increase unit cost substantially.

Therefore, a series of phone innovations, smart marketing, and cutting edge manufacturing methods would be needed.

It's a long shot, it couldn't be done on a small scale, and some deep thinkers would be needed in the executive suite to anticipate and or create improved technology, and to lower manufacturing costs.

So, is it possible? Of course. anything is. But it's probably not likely.

EDIT: Perhaps a successful strategy would be to concentrate on going simpler and less expensive, instead of higher tech and more expensive. Make the simplest basic phone that a toddler could use. Most people don't use half of the shit that is on their smartphone anyway. Concentrate on the market demographic that wants something that is simple and reliable. Talk, text, basic camera, period. As technology advances, the burden of "too many choices" becomes real for many people. Technology advancement doesn't always have to mean "more features".

[LuckyCharms]

19. You're welcome, Mary. Pls see my edit as well.

[jmowreader]

18. Yes to bringing it back, no to small scale

If Apple - who makes Mac Pros in Texas - wanted to build an iPhone factory in the US, they could. However, it’s going to be row after row of robots and wave soldering machines with almost no human involvement.

[Hugin]

20. Reverse the process by which they were offshored...

Find an excess facility somewhere, make a deal, and bring it to the US.

Building a fab from scratch is much more expensive and most of it will have to be imported anyway.

[Hugin]

34. I aim to please.

Since the feature race has gone into ridiculous extremes, you might be able to find some bargains on the fabs. Of course, the Mary-o-phone wouldn’t have the latest whizz bang features. IMHO, those are gourmet hairsplitting anyway.

Instead, I would suggest you target the horribly underserved rugged reliability (with style) market.

One thing though, spare no expense on the radio, operating system, and user interface. Remember RUGGEDNESS!

[Hugin]

70. Some links of interest where a DYI phone can be accomplished...

I know your example of a smart phone was of many possible manufacturing efforts and what you really are after is a SpaceX type manufacturing entrepreneurial initiative. I did a search and found to my surprise that indeed a custom branded smartphone handset can be easily and cheaply built. But, I bet if you made the right offer they would make the fabs, too.

Really from scratch (2016) : https://www.zdnet.com/article/yes-you-can-build-your-own-smartphone/

WSJ feature :

Modular smartphones (2017) :

There are many more.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

69. The only excess fab facilities are for obsolete chip technology. . . . nt

[Pobeka]

22. A simple memory chip plant requires an investment of billions of dollars

I toured a pilot plant at Micron in Boise a number of years ago. They mentioned the cost of each machine in the clean rooms. I did a quick count of machines and was floored -- it was literally billions of dollars in a small plant.

How would you produce chips for this phone?

The problem doesn't scale.

[dumbcat]

48. This thread is not going any better than your other one

Are you convinced yet?

[dumbcat]

64. Think what you will

But you think wrongly. And it's pretty obvious that you refuse to change your thinking.

[hunter]

68. Food fight! Although I actually do know how to make this plan work...

First you secretly purchase a container of off-brand cell phones from China, brands unfamiliar to most Americans, perhaps made on some factory ghost shift.

Then you take your empty buildings here in the U.S.A. and hire a bunch of desperate people to scrape off any "Made in China" labels or other identifying marks and replace these with "Making America Great Again!" labels.

Sell these "Great American" phones to clueless Republican voters and PROFIT!

[lame54]

61. Which state will be our dumpng site?

[WarGamer]

67. You can look at this logically

What is a phone?

Well, there's a screen and a battery and thousands of chips and sensors and a frame and camera, lots of stuff.

If you were to ask, "Can we produce memory chips here?" then the answer is YES, we could and we do... it takes years and billions of dollars to set up the chip fab that actually produces the memory chips.

But the problem is, a phone isn't just memory chips, it's 1000's of different components produced by mfg that specialize in ONE thing.

Gorilla glass made by a company that does gorilla glass. The camera sensor is produced by a company that makes sensors.

To build a smartphone here from US made parts would require the formation of hundreds of different companies that all specialize in making something unique.



Note: if you are talking about BUILDING phones in the US, with foreign made components... YES ABSOLUTELY it could be done BUT the phones would be outrageously expensive.

[LudwigPastorius]

73. It's hard to tell if Purism is dumb, because...

they are not a publicly traded company. There is no way of knowing if they've turned a profit yet.

I do know that there are many people on the internet who are complaining that they sent them money years ago, but have yet to receive a phone.

[WarGamer]

74. Yeah, so?

I'm familiar with them.

They build the phone HERE but use ALL Chinese and imported parts, lol...

And like I said... it starts at $2000 and it's features compare to a Moto G phone that costs $230

Which is precisely... what I just told you.

[Emrys]

75. Page top: "The Librem 5 is expecting long shipping delays due to parts procurement lead-times, ..."

And with that, this thread is now getting trashed. The 40 seconds I gave it is more than it's worth given what else is going on in the world.