alt Hacker News> What law do you want to write to make it so that knowledge can't be transferred to other countries?
Actually, this is fairly standard via export control laws. When a certain technology is deemed critical, it can be put under export control. When I worked in the semiconductor space, some of the advanced tech we had was subject to these laws. Countries came under different tiers - we could freely discuss the tech with most European countries, but had to be a lot more careful with China and Russia. We couldn't/wouldn't hire Chinese/Russian nationals unless they already had a green card (the legal process was too challenging).
Of course, not saying electronics manufacturing should have been in that bucket. But there is plenty of precedence.
Thanks, that seems like a reasonable way to do it, if it were to be done, though the types of manufacturing would have to be very specific.
We could perhaps outsource mass precision manufacturing of aluminum iphone and macbook cases to Germany, or try to build up the industry over time in the US that would enable such manufacturing. But such multi-year delays that are kinda-sorta in the interest of a nation but not at all in the immediate interest of a private company and US consumers, imposed by politicians that have not bothered to dive deep into the issue but are instead responding to half-informed populist revolt, seem like a dangerous path.
If something like that were to be done, a carrot approach is far more likely to yield better outcomes than the stick approach of export controls, IMHO.