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?
Unfortunately, we need to compete on quality AND price. We should be able to make it for lower cost (if we use economies of scale and start to export again to the world) if we focus on recycling products and building extensible product lines.
We should not be "replacing" stuff - because that incentivizes cheap replacement (ie. china and india)
We need to have heirloom goods like you said - but future tech heirloom goods.
We should have cameras which are made here, and can be upgraded for the next 50 years with better senors, compatible lenses, processors that you upgrade and keep the body, or swap the chassis and keep the innards.
That is how we make people invest in OUR technology. By actually having companies respect the customers and giving them truly good quality stuff that is designed to be maintained for a lifetime.
China has matched quality for replaceable stuff over the past 10-20 years. Its sad, but I just picked up some recording equipment and best enthusiast level stuff and below professional is all chinese companies.
It shouldn't cost more than buying new to upgrade it. We shouldn't incentivize printers....we should incentivize it more like the way computers are upgraded, but ultimately - we need licenses that incentivize the adoption.
Apple went all walled garden and that won't be the way we incentive local development and new factories. We need open systems, but local factories and manufacturing, and brands to work on open standards (not just one - they can compete like Playstation vs Switch vs Xbox)
I love upgrading and fixing my stuff so it lasts decades. My old computer is basically a glorified super nintendo and private wow server cost very little to upgrade to the max hardware it could run back in its heyday. I have cars and trucks from the 60’s 70’s and 80’s I love to work on and keep running. The only tractor I have is from 1978. Things don’t need to be high tech. I’m a computer geek and a gear head with a water cooled pc since 2001 and even I don’t want all the extra techy shit in all my vehicles.
I agree with you that we need high tech manufacturing back on our shores, and need to keep china from stealing it once developed and producing it without the heavy R&D costs, but we also need simple low tech consumer goods that are cheap enough to compete and good enough to last.
We may need a societal shift to accomplish this and without it being caused by war, I don’t know how else we could change enough minds.
I agree we need to have some 'low tech' stuff too. I just don't want to accept the false statement that we must go back to old technology only.
I want the west to run the future and support good quality low tech as well.
I don't want my lawnmower talking to my fridge or my internet unless I control the software and the server it talks to and made them talk on my behalf, but yeah, I don't want high tech junk for no added benefit or ridiculously complex electronics inside of mundane equipment
It would be nice to control low to high tech manufacturing but we have to start somewhere and we need to be able to set this up ourselves(cause no one will do it for us).
Starting a 4nm chip factory is a bit out of our price ranges, unless Elon and Bezos spends time lurking here. Edison motors here in canada started a business retrofitting old semis to be hybrid diesel electric, to fit a niche industry need , be cheaper to operate and be able yo be repaired with off the shelf parts. I think he’s got a good idea and I’d like to see more. The average person doesn’t need a car with a $60000 battery pack, here they need awd or 4x4 for the bad weather and simple enough to operate and fix. Taking your new car to the stealership these days is horrible and worse when off warranty. Lower tech doesn’t necessarily mean bad or a step down in usefulness.