Ask HN: What would it take to make a robot vacuum in the USA?

This is just wrong; it's literally the opposite problem. The United States has been raising kids on 1960s curriculum for half a century, and now the only workers we can produce as a nation are the ones being trained and paid cheaper in China. College-for-all is the only policy that works; the United State's economy, not monetary policy, has ensured that our labor will never be competitive unless we tax imports. And if you tax imports, you might as well be admitting that the US can't compete anyways.

> But many Americans understand that the trade and monetary policies have undercut their own earning potential, and they buy those cheaper Chinese goods with great resentment, simply because _there are no longer alternatives_ in a huge number of categories.

Lmao. Yeah, with "great resentment" the average American buys their iPhone. There's just no alternative!

No, the average American (and most of the "good old boy" conservatives you're describing) care about nothing other than price and marketing. They'll piss and moan about oursourcing while buying a Vietnamese slim-jim in line to pay for Saudi-enriched fuel at the gas station. They'll shake their fist and claim it's the government's fault, but they know full-well a lassier-faire economy would only exacerbate the problems of foreign influence. China and Russia do not somehow become less equipped to manipulate our economy with less regulation. That's a fantasy.

You know what? Go build your robot vacuum. I'm actually really moved by your plight, and nothing would make me happier than watching you retread this perennial problem. Just don't come crying to me when you spend more than the MSRP of a Vision Pro paying for 4 locally made brushless encoders. We tried warning you, you insisted otherwise.

With electronics you might get your PCBs manufactured and assembled by someone else (it’s a specialised job that needs expensive equipment).

But you can do the design locally with skilled engineers.

With enclosures and plastic parts you need injection moulding setups - again a specialised thing to do. So you might also choose to outsource that.

But you have local people who do the CAD and mould design.

What you’ll end up doing is the assembly side of things - so someone else will be doing the actual hard manufacturing of parts and you’ll be plugging things together and packaging things up.

As soon as you realise that then it’s quickly obvious that should be done where all the component parts are being manufactured.

So, you end up just doing the R&D part.

But eventually you realise that your manufacturing partners understand and know a lot more than your local people.

So, you end up outsourcing everything to China…

I used to work on an FIRST robotics team in high school; every year we had to fundraise ~$20,000 for the component cost (not labor for software or hardware) of our USA-made robot chassis. Our robots were bigger, but that really only amounted to a larger aluminum frame. And just so you know, our assembly period took around 6-8 weeks (and we didn't have to miniaturize anything).

If you insisted upon making everything here in America, I legitimately would not be surprised if you ended up with a multi-thousand dollar component bill for each model sold. The reason why China beats us is because they can mass-produce everything needed for the supply chain of these machines, and we cannot.

so a $1,000 MSRP consumer electronics item might need to be manufactured for a cost of $100-$200.

i think that if one wants to make products in the US, the cost of distribution and retail and transportation needs to be addressed, and it seems nobody wants to touch that hot potato