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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, 10:13 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. 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.

[radicalleft]

13. Well actually

it's very close...

[we can do it]

14. Why don't you make one, do a video & show us how easy.

[we can do it]

93. Are you Tyler or Mary?

“Your” 6 year old video and the comments following don’t really bolster your case.

[dumbcat]

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.)

[exboyfil]

51. Which begs the question

Why Austin? Plenty of water in the Mississippi watershed. Wouldn't another state make more sense.

[dumbcat]

67. Lots of reasons

land costs, workforce availability, taxes, friendly business climate. Little things like that. A lot of complex factors go into such decisions.

The easy answer is someone got paid off.

[USALiberal]

17. Then start your own company! Nt

[USALiberal]

36. Send me a link to your company.

[inthewind21]

77. In other words

No. lol

[MineralMan]

37. OK. What is the nature of your business? What do you manufacture?

Educate us on how a technology company can be created by crowd-funding. Share your knowledge, expertise, and experience.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

42. It's much easier to post about unicorns than to grow one, isn't it. . . . .nt

[MineralMan]

48. Well, yes. Besides, the unicorn business is extremely iffy.

I wouldn't go into a business like that, I think.

[MineralMan]

47. Telling us about the kind of business you operate is not outing yourself.

You can be general about it. But, if you manufacture goods, then your experience with manufacturing might be evidence that you understand what such a business entails. See my post below, where I talk about one of my businesses during my working life. I'm an entrepreneur, too, and I discuss what my business was.

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.

So, what sort of business do you have? Retail? Service? Manufacturing? What? How many employees do you have? You don't have to reveal your identity to discuss those things.

[MineralMan]

56. OK. Suit yourself.

You proposed something. But, when asked to discuss your proposal, you fell back on the "It's not brain surgery" thing over and over again.

I'm glad you're a rich entrepreneur, located in the South. Maybe you should start a cell phone manufacturing company, using your experience as an entrepreneur to guide you. It has been tried already. The entrepreneur who tried to start a cell phone company has not been heard from for some time. It didn't work.

It's not that I don't believe you. It's that I want you to explain a little more about how a business manufacturing high-tech products in a crowded industry might possibly succeed. I'm not seeing that as a possibility. Maybe you know something I don't know. I don't see any evidence of that, though.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

69. Correct. It is more difficult and can't be "crowd-funded" the way a family can crowd-fund

... crowd-fund surgery for their child.

It can't be crowd-funded the way a wannabe brain surgeon could crowd fund their med school.

Those like you who can't see the difference are neither brain surgeons nor high tech entrepreneurs.

[we can do it]

57. Avon lady? Tupperware? Spill it or it didn't happen.

[we can do it]

63. Nope I'm female, independent sales contractor presently.

Retired professional firefighter/paramedic. Fine arts degree, have done illustrations, portraits and graphic design. Landscape art….get real. Every single one of those jobs require more specific education beyond my bachelors degree.

Taking dilapidated abandoned buildings and converting to clean rooms, etc needed for tech manufacturing goes way beyond “crowd sourcing”.🙄

Who’s going to buy these phones? It’s hard enough for established companies to keep our identities and info safe from hackers….

[we can do it]

72. My mom told me not to trust bullshitters and call them out.

No I am not an employee.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

65. Except you have answered to men many times in this thread. Further, "rich", "from south", & "female"

... have nothing to do with ability to your lack of ability to evaluate your hair-brained "crowd funding" ideas for high tech electronics manufacturing.

They neither disqualify nor qualify you to call realists "defeatists".

You guessed right. Your resume is not enough. It is not even a start.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

71. Nah. I have no jealousy for stupid unrealistic ideas. Prove us all wrong by doing it

But you won't because you can't.

You wouldn't even make money putting seed capital into such nonsense that flies into the face of reality.

Try. Come back in three months or six months and show us how you have gotten it off the ground. You can even make a killing offering us high priced shares to get in on it then.

But you won't because you are all hot air on the issue of high tech manufacturing.

Keep posting and exposing yourself.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

50. Nobody said it is impossible. We said you are clueless about repurposing a few buildings to do it.nt

[USALiberal]

94. Lol, nice try, wow, unbelievable! Nt

[Bernardo de La Paz]

21. Brain surgery takes a team of 10 & back staff of 10 for recovery.

Making smart phones takes team of hundreds before even one phone is built.

You are right. It's not brain surgery.

[BeerBarrelPolka]

24. Terrific

Terrific answer !! Very, very true.

[zaj]

49. Google Dunning Krueger Effect

[lagomorph777]

19. Correct. High tech products require massive investments to manufacture.

Phones are not really an Etsy item to be handcrafted in little boutique shops.

I'm not saying we shouldn't encourage such investments. But we have to recognize that certain kinds of products require that.

[lagomorph777]

96. That's pretty amusing.

But it won't actually work because it's GSM, which was shut down years ago.

It's assembled from a bunch of Chinese PCBs.

[Luizy]

66. We need to cut our reliance on other countries

Not eliminate them entirely, but cut them.
So I am with you on this one.

[DetroitLegalBeagle]

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.

[dumbcat]

16. Please show us how

Do a youtube video. I'd really enjoy seeing it.

[lagomorph777]

20. Making a phone would stymie the smartest of brain surgeons.

It's the product of thousands of very smart engineers and support staff. And none of them, individually, could do it.

[BeerBarrelPolka]

22. Absolutely

[Sherman A1]

8. Despite the response of the OP claiming you post was defeatist

Reality says you are correct.

[fescuerescue]

3. here's a good article on the problem

It even explains why it would be really expensive to start small.

https://fee.org/articles/a-made-in-america-iphone-would-cost-2-000-studies-show/

[kacekwl]

7. It's rocket surgery and

Brain science combined. So there.

[Sherman A1]

9. Hardly defeatist

More realistic.

[USALiberal]

18. Lol, ok!

[Bernardo de La Paz]

23. This didn't get to be America by unicorns & butterflies. Realists made America

You are very distant from being a realist.

[Amishman]

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.

[fescuerescue]

32. I didn't write the article. Here's the deal

If a company could make money doing what you suggest.

They would do it. They would be doing it. they would LOVE to do it. It would be a huge boon for their PR image.

Look. I'd LOVE to see the US have a center of excellence for making phones and high tech gear. I used to work for a high tech company that you would recognize. It always pained me to see our products only built overseas.

To get this done, we have to find a company that is willing to do it while losing money.

Every iPhone you buy. Every android you buy is subsided by cheap foreign labor. Everyone one of us with a smartphone in our pocket in complicit.

But how long can ANY company run at a loss?

[USALiberal]

39. This post didn't go well for you!

[Torchlight]

53. ok lol nt

[Captain Stern]

80. LOL. I think an 'oops' may be in order here. n/t

[48656c6c6f20]

10. No. Today we look at problems and say

That's too hard. We used to say, let's get this going. The spirit is dead. It's safer to say, we can't do it.

[ChazII]

11. +1 We need

to get that spirit back.

[MiHale]

74. Hmm...empty buildings...let's see what we can do...

Manufacturing phones, why? There are more than enough phone manufacturers. Insanely expensive to start, supply line problems with chips, etc., you heard all the arguments.

I my experience as an entrepreneur 2 companies that ran for over 20 years each and profitable throughout, this is when you start working to explore other options. More intelligent entrepreneurs than I am have told me this is when you also employ the K.I.S.S. principle, keep it simple stupid.

You’re starting the endeavor…what are your strengths, your weaknesses, your knowledge of your product. How are you going to market your product? You know about the empty buildings would any need to be retrofitted for your company to run efficiently? What is the size of your intended market? Do you need employees, how many? Would they need special training for your product?

About 4 years ago a group of my fellow business owners and I were discussing those very questions. We were thinking of starting a vertical farming operation. Most of the buildings we were considering were tall commercial buildings with plenty of windows. It would be a hydroponic based farm so contaminated water was a concern. I’m not going to get all into it but the idea did not come to fruition.

So in ending there are other products you can bring to market…it just takes a little hard work on your part to figure out your desires.

[MiHale]

79. I'm in the process of my next endeavor...

RETIREMENT . Discovering the joys of Cannabis and vegetable gardening. Snowshoe hiking in winter regular hiking and kayaking spring, summer, fall, rediscovering the happiness I find while cooking and generally keeping my dear sweet wife happy and smiling.

Work is highly overrated.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

25. Wrong. There are a zillion counter-examples where American realists solve problems.

Thinking that the main problem is repurposing a few empty buildings is not being a realist.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

31. You are having difficulty reading your own thread. Seek assistance. . . . nt

[Bernardo de La Paz]

40. The QUESTION is stupid because it doesn't matter. You have no rejoinder to the points

... multiple protestors have made so you resort to irrelevant personal questions.

Going to call somebody a loser next like you did in the other thread?

It doesn't matter if a person is an employee or entrepreneur when their points are correct and unrefuted, as has been shown multiple times in this thread.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

45. Ha! Starting a business is easy. Making a successful smart phone business is not easy

... but you think it is.

Prove it. You can't.

[MineralMan]

46. I have been an entrepreneur since 1974.

I have started up several businesses. One, which is marginally like a manufacturing business, was my small software company, 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...

[TheProle]

84. It's against DU ToS

To ask that.

[48656c6c6f20]

81. My opinion isn't wrong

It's just not yours. That was also a throw back to how we used to do things.

[HAB911]

12. American won't pay for service at a restaurant

or the full price of hamberders at a fast food joint without slave labor, much less what an American made cell phone would cost

I have no hope of this happening

[hunter]

27. Why should I care where stuff is made?

Mostly I care about HOW stuff is made.

Is the work dangerous? Are the workers treated well? Do they get paid a comfortable living wage? How much damage is done to the natural environment? Etc.

We are all one people sharing one planet.

I judge nations by the general health and happiness of their people.

If I was Emperor of the Earth I'd pay people to experiment with lifestyles that have very small environmental footprints and I'd judge the success of those experiments in terms of happiness, not any sort of "productivity" beyond what it takes to live a comfortable life.

Maybe we'd discover that cell phones don't really make people happy and we wouldn't have to manufacture so many of them, especially the sort that only last a few years.

Things like cars and cell phones do not make me happy. I don't have any influence over those industries. I bought a new car once back in the 'eighties. It's not likely I'll ever do that again. I'm a pretty good mechanic so I can afford to drive $1,000 cars. I still use a flip phone. It's my third. The first two were made obsolete by the cell phone companies as they upgraded from 2G to 3G to 4G LTE. As a consumer I didn't have much choice in the matter. This is the flip phone we've got, take it or leave it.

Economic productivity as we now define it isn't any sort of productivity at all. It is, in fact, a direct measure of the damage we are doing to the natural environment and our own human spirit.

The sorts of manufacturing that matter most to me are things like indoor plumbing, safe tap water, reliable electricity supplies, sewage treatment plants, birth control, and healthy food. Every 21st century human deserves those. Nations that can't provide those services to all are broken, usually because their political ideologies and religions are crap.

[MineralMan]

34. An empty building is not a manufacturing facility.

If you started today to set up a facility to manufacture phones or other technological products, you would still be working on setting it up a year from now, or even longer. To manufacture phones or laptops or anything of the sort, you need specialized equipment that is not available off the shelf from anyone.

Manufacturing is not a matter of setting up some work tables and getting started next week.

[Johnny2X2X]

54. We shouldn't want to manufacture phones in the US

Economies of scale have delivered high tech devices for relatively cheap prices to enrich the lives of Americans. We should not have an economy that strives to bring manufacturing back, we should strive to develop an educated work force that can meet the demands of a high tech service driven market.

The answer isn't bringing back cheap labor industries, the answer is giving American workers the skills they need to thrive in the current and future environment. So we've got engineering firms developing apps to run on these phones, working on networks to make these phones run better, and researching new technology to go into these phones. That's where our workers need to be, and we've only been telling people that for darned near 50 years.

The days of placing a part of a board 8 hours a day in the US are gone, as they should be.

[Bev54]

64. Anybody wanting to invest in your company is going to expect you to be able to answer the tough

questions, some which are posed here but hardly the toughest. If you cannot answer them satisfactorily and have plans to mitigate every stumbling block then you are going nowhere. As a banker I have dealt with many a people who have their business plan on a napkin, lots of enthusiasm but unrealistic goals and no mitigation plans. Sorry, I don't think people will want to invest because you say it can be done, with no track to showing it.

[exboyfil]

59. What about those who are on the left half of the bell curve

He takes a lot of smarts and determination to become an engineer. I have watched many even dedicated individuals wash out during the process (then went on to get business degrees).

I admit we are not pipelining enough US citizens into STEM fields, but not everyone is suited for it either.

[Johnny2X2X]

62. There will always be low skilled jobs

But we aren't coming close to meeting the market's demand for engineers and technical workers. Our schools are failing us, there aren't enough of the types of skilled workers our economy needs coming out of our schools. Let's start meeting this demand, it will grow the economy for low shilled workers too.

US firms are farming out engineering work to India and Mexico, not because they want cheap labor, but because there simply isn't the manpower to do the engineering work here in the US.

We can start by making college more affordable. But we also have to invest in primary and secondary education programs that push kids into math and science. There are millions of kids out there with the aptitude to become engineers that just aren't being given the chance.

I was a child of the 70s and 80s, all I ever heard was that to live a middle class lifestyle in the future I would need a degree. Over and over again it was drilled into my head. And low and behold, here we are in 2022 and you mostly need a good degree to live the middle class lifestyle our parents did.

[dumbcat]

75. a good point

I'm not sure how much things have changed in the half century since I was in engineering school, but my electrical engineering class started with 150 students my freshman year. On graduation day in 1970 we graduated 55. Most of the dropouts were in the first two years and switched to business majors.

That dropout rate was considered normal back then. And this was a rather small, private school with 7 applicants for every seat in the freshman class. I wonder what the normal dropout rate is in engineering schools today?

And speaking of STEM, I was an engineering mentor for a high school FIRST Robotics team for several years. Most of the students in the STEM programs were female. I think that is also the new normal.

[exboyfil]

55. A pretty good smart phone can be had for $30

While Apple gets away with charging hundreds even up to thousands of dollars for them. The real value is in both the IP and marketing culture, and a lot of those dollars are made and spent by those residing in the US.

I would love for us to make most of the stuff we consume, but as others have pointed out you are dealing with some pretty drastic barriers to entry for electronics.

[FakeNoose]

83. My apologies DUers, I've never done this before

... however I feel that I must trash this thread. And I've put this poster (Mary in S.Carolina) on full ignore.
Again I apologize to DUers who are earnestly trying appease her. It's just not worth it.

[ShazzieB]

92. Oh, please stop posing that.

The so-called "smartphone" pictured at that link looks like some crude toy version of the real thing. It's fine to play around with building something like that just for fun, but it's a hell of a long way from that to anything realistically marketable.

[Samrob]

85. It's as much about tax avoidance as cheap labor. Relatively, corporations here have had

cheap labor for decades considering the low minimum wages and for non-degreed and non-skilled laborers.

As I said before, when taxes at the upper 10% were highest, most American workers were better off and our economy and manufacturing where the envy of the world. As soon as the greedy began to gouge the needy and focus Federal subsidies on the wealthy and corporations through huge tax breaks and loopholes, we have been sliding more and more into a divisive nation. With Republicans at the helm, the slide was greater and faster beginning with Ronnie boy.

You just can't deny the inconvenient truth of our history.

[CrackityJones75]

95. Why the nastiness to the OP?

The poster asked a question and was immediately met with ridicule.