Everyone talks about Hauwei, but no one is talking about the fact that the leaders in consumer, prosumer, and almost all "action" cameras are coming out of China by private state owned chinese firms.
DJI, Arachi Visions Inc are pushing lots of products that are getting adopted by all sorts of consumers. They are better than GoPro in terms of features, and they are even pushing the build quality beyond the traditional "chinese cheap crap"
It seems to me that they are funding their military through selling drones. The worse problem is that no western companies are even competing well anymore because they all get their stuff built in Taiwan or China anyways.
Western countries need to bring back the real manufacturing if there is hope for the next 10 years and beyond. China builds almost all technology that people are buying, and European and American companies sent all that oversees....
Until we are running the ability to fabricate high quality cameras for mass consumers, and prosumers, the western world will be unable to fund its R&D into better tech, and essentially, China will fund its military development and sell anything civilian back to keep the money flowing.
We used to do this....Our military research used to end up in our hands as cool products....now we don't do anything.
Our culture isn't dying....we gave it away long ago. We need to legitimately rebuild our economy. Everyone in the west has become kind of pathetic imo.
They are either complete luddites and too dumb to understand we need this technology otherwise we will be enslaved by it if we cannot control its real production (ie. Infrastructure and hardware)
The biggest lie was the "service economy".....to me it sounds like they are turning America into the butler and maid class under the pretense that we will be "designers" and "thinkers".......yeah right. We haven't built things in this country for decades...what knowledge do we possess to offer....
They are converting America in to fast food and call centers.....that is why they want cheap labour....America is not seen as an "intelligent" country any more.
Most of the western world gave it away to China....India....Japan is actually now buying up America.....why....because we are not just falling behind....we are behind, and we cannot catch up for a decade or more.....
All these "Design Firms" are accelerating the problem if they do not manufacture locally. They literally pay to do all the hard work and 'design' stuff, but every time the failures prop up the chinese....then after all the trial and error - we get something....that they now knockoff without paying for R&D...infact...they were paid by our R&D....Like....our country is retarded.
I too would like to see manufacturing return to north america. Products made to last, not the cheapest chinesium that breaks the first use and you need to buy another. Tools that pass from grandfather down to great grandchild. Cars and trucks that are repairable and can be limped home to fix properly later with a 1/2”, 9/16” wrenches, a chunk of wire and a pair of vice grips.
We need to identify products that will be needed, be worth the larger cost making it here requires and provides value to the consumer to get them to choose it over the cheap alternative for the quality, and need a way to keep the government the fuck out of it. The last part is the hardest nigh on impossible.
We need to make our own computer chips. We need to own the future of automobiles, we need a much more robust electrical system(perhaps more neighbourhood generating stations rather than grid based), we need to find a way to eliminate the consumer culture that thinks “I’ll just get another one” and go back to “I need to fix this one”. We need better products, and better people. The first, I and others here may be able to do. The second? Maybe a third world war can wipe out some large number of idiots and soyboys but I have my doubts.
Might be a good topic for a round table discussion. What products do we need in the western hemisphere, how do we make them desirable over cheap chinese shit, and how do we keep the government out of the way/off our backs to do it?
Every nation need this. But this is impossible with current capitalism-like system.
You underestimate chineese, they make everything, not just cheap shit, but also high-quality tools and things. And that high quality things will always cost less than anything produced on the West. And potential customer will always prefer cheaper option among things of same quality.
At least you need some kind of patriotic modification of capitalism with some things alternated to encourage domestic consumption.
I don't know what it should like, so no any recipes or even suggestions.
In Russia, limiting free trade by sanctions worked to some extent into things you describe. People began to think more about reliability and their own more than about saving money. But that obviously not how things should be.
I will be very interested to hear some recipe of building capitalism with free trade and all that stuff that will inherently encourage product quality, reliability and longevity over profits. Seriously.
I’ve not purchased everything, obviously, so I’ve yet to run across anything high quality as far as tools come when it bears made in China on it(or no country designated, telling without telling as it were). Every time, it bends, or breaks when I’m trying to do a simple job with it. I lucked out and got an old farmers anvil for $75. Definitely higher quality than the crap I’d find at the store for 4 times what I paid. Right now we have two major issues to address. China is able to use slave labour and pay non living wages to workers to produce cheaper goods, and its somehow cheaper to ship raw material over the ocean in boats that get 1 foot to 5 gallons of fuel oil for gas mileage. Then once produced, ship the finished(or partially complete to be “assembler in america” later) back over the ocean on those same ships.
Now, if we had nuclear powered shipping containers I could see this being cheaper due to lower fuel cost. But just how the fuck did anyone manage to make it cheaper to ship something over the ocean twice to sell a cheap product? Theres too much behind the scenes numbers jiggling to make much sense of this.
Sanctions don’t work well enough. Our globalistic retards in charge(I refuse to call them leaders) wont flat out ban imports from china and even if they did, they just sell then with another country as a middleman. Suddenly that cheap chinesium product says made in Retardistan and its let through the boarder anyways.
The only workable solution that will have the required effect is mass death and destruction of manufacturing in china. Blow up the 3 gorges dam, kill 400 million potential workers in one swipe, bomb their factory cities like its WW2 and reduce them to the stone age. Cancel all debt owed to them as they can’t enforce repayment as we take down their military the same time we bomb the cities. I admit this wont be a popular position due to most people being pussies and thinking their grade 2 teacher was right when we could all love together in peace and harmony. I honestly don’t care. No matter your religion, no matter your political position, we all die. Its just a matter of how and why. And as such I don’t care. I’m not a bleeding heart, I don’t care about strangers feelings and if the world has to be a shitty place I’ll take one with less idiots and assholes in it.
We don’t need battery powered cars or rifles, we need stand alone items that will last and be ready when needed. Bullets that will fire 80 years after being made, cars that can be push started if the battery goes dead overnight, refrigerators that last 60 years not ones that need a wifi connection and “updates”.
The average consumer is an idiot. They don’t need or want 500 settings, they want their refrigerator. You get it home, you plug it in, and it works. Complicated “do everything” devices have been popular for too long and they mostly suck. A combination alarm clock radio is fine. A bbq/smoker that needs a firmware update over wifi before you can turn it back on to use it is not. Your toilet does not need to be able to send emails. Devices and tools need to be good at what they do, not be kinda okay at doing 6 things. I want my hammer yo hit the fucking thing and be ready to do it again, not break cause I hit the nail slightly off centre and then connect to my car to connect to its internet connection to automatically order me a hello kitty hand grip from amazon because I squeezed the handle three times accidentally.
Can anyone come up with ideas that can be made locally, better than imports, that will last and be desired by the local population? Pickup trucks became popular because farmers and tradesmen found them to be incredibly useful for their work. Dishwashers and vacuum cleaners took off because they reduced the work needed to keep a home clean. If we’re going to make something it has to add value to the purchasers life or they wont buy it or recommend it to others.
That does not mean Chineese tools can't be good. That only means that managers of homedepots you bought Chineese crap ordered crap from China.
It's not hard to find high quality tools on aliexpress, f.e. avoiding that bean counting managers who don't even understand anything about tools or quality. Just don't serarch for cheapest option, look for highest rated things with large number of comments. Look at customer provided photos and so on.
No, that's not how that work now. Chineese do not work for the bowl of rice anymore. They just vary componetns and assembly quality to satisfy price request. Obviously, western managers ordering stuff in China always serach lowest price. Chineese will not tell a word about that. They'll just made product from garbage. If customer want cheap, he will get cheap. If you want quality - talk with Chineese about quality, not about fucking price, and that's all.
IDK, but for Russia they work perfectly. Western sanctions is the best thing that happened with Russian economy during all capitalistic existence since USSR fall.
If you are not aware, before 2014 the main goal of Russian economy was maintaining RUB/USD rate. It is literally in the law about Russian central bank. More Western sanctions was introduced since then, less importance that goal had for real sector of economy. Today hardly anybody except CB care about RUB/USD. And CBRF today is the only obstacle for even higher Russian economy grow. Manufacturers become more important than importers. And since question of RUB/USD rate become irrelevant, other questions rised before manufacturers, including quality and other things.
I anticipate sanctions not because they do some harm, but because it is not how international trade should be organized.
However, I don't know what mechanism should be introduced into world trade to make questions of quality, reliability and all that stuff more important than plain profit.
As you could notice, nowdays profits, that theoretically should drive economy, have no any connection with quality, reliability and longevity of goods. May be in the past, manufacturer with higher quality of product got higher profits, because people prefer quality products. But today, profits depend only on fucking marketing and/or even worse - on lower quality of the product, forcing customer to buy same shit again and again.
Until this drawback of capitalism is resolved, world economy is doomed.
To be at least theoretically able to do that, West have to reindustrialize itself, and not just reindustrialize, but build another economy, driven by quality, not by profits. Serioulsy, all (and I mean really all, without exception) western weaponry is total crap on the battlefield. It is not weapons made for the battle. It is a crap made for showroom with insane price. West, with such crap, have no single chance against China.
If you need kind of violent solution, I could propose extermination of all that fucking managers who care only about money, price and their bonuses. All Western system of reselling should be totaly exterminated. Every single business school where profit put over quality, reliability and longevity should be leveled. Every single shop owner, who will think about ordering crap for the sake of saving few cents should be heavily fined. And so on. And when it will be done, China will not be a problem for the nation economy.
China really not very interested in Western market anymore, if you are not aware. West is already satuated market for them, with miserable 500M customers, who already full with Chineese goods. China is much more interested in African, Middle East and Latin America markets. They are much larger and is far from saturation. The only problem is that all those billions of customers are not wealthy enough. So China rush to noticeably rise the income of that nations. That is why you see all that China investments all over the world. Chineese making customers for themselves. With rising income in third world, China will be able to sell crap first, then third-world will began to buy better, more expensive goods to replace crap, then even better goods and so on. West is absolutely nothing comparing with that.
And West have absolutely nothing to offer for China and the world. China is not interested in fiat, financial services or LGBTXYZ+ crap. And this is a good opportunity for the West to break its damned liberal system and become useful member of world trade. From history we know that the West had something to offer to the world - inventions, engineering, manufacturing culture. But today it exectly things that Western elites thoroughly destroy with insane rate with all their DEI, profit-driven capitalism, marketing idiocy and so on.
It's not China destroying West. It is Western elites who do that and Western version of capitalism where profit and financial games is more important than making real, useful and high-quality goods.
I agree with plenty of your points. I second the elimination of useless middle managers and we can outsource that to Vlad the Impaler, look at us already creating jobs!
China has a culture of “if you can cheat someone, cheat them. Its their fault if they don’t catch you cheating them” so I have a hard time trusting “quality” from them even if paid for. Could just be disinfo of course, but horror stories of bad products not at all close to spec, wrong steel, wrong thickness etc has me holding onto my wallet more than opening it.
As you mentioned the sanctions worked great on your end. Didn’t do fuck all what they were “supposed” to do, as they were sold to the public. Maybe its just the elites laughing at us via shadow puppet games but I’m as sick of the crony-capitalism as you are.
I too miss when a company that made a good product got high profits because they earned and deserved it. The west has been in a lull for too long. Everything lately(and for a long while) is just a rehash of something else or an improvement of what came before. Internet is just improved telephone, which is improved telegraph, which is improved messenger, which was better than walking over there and saying it yourself. Electric cars aren’t a new idea, they tried them almost 100 years ago. Nuclear power seems new, but its just swapping burning coal or petroleum for radioactive heat source.
I don’t know if they won with television and later the internet in ruining our imagination but we haven’t been churning out new ideas in what feels like forever. We need to fix that somehow. I’m not saying this cause I just want to get rich off it, I just don’t want to see our species turn into the round retards in Wall-E.