Churning them out by the millions with sufficiently narrow tolerances to "just work" and doing so at an attractive price point requires a very finely tuned manufacturing operation and that kind of thing doesn't happen overnight.
If some despot had all the ball point pen production people rounded up and shot it would take us while before we figured out how to make ball point pens in the same volume at the same price again because there's a lot of tribal knowledge that goes into this sort of thing. This is basically the position China is in because they want to make ball point pens but they don't have any ball point pen people.
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They're simple enough.
Churning them out by the millions with sufficiently narrow tolerances to "just work" and doing so at an attractive price point requires a very finely tuned manufacturing operation and that kind of thing doesn't happen overnight.
If some despot had all the ball point pen production people rounded up and shot it would take us while before we figured out how to make ball point pens in the same volume at the same price again because there's a lot of tribal knowledge that goes into this sort of thing. This is basically the position China is in because they want to make ball point pens but they don't have any ball point pen people.