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 work with Chineese closely for more than 10 years. I understand how Chineese way of doing business could look to you, but it's not cheating at all.
From what I learned, it works like that: Chineese assume, that customer knows better what he wants and account everything. So, some western manager come to Chineese and want to buy a batch of hand drills. Chineese tell price for some decent model. Manager asks - "could you make it sligtly cheaper?" - in hope for some bonuses from bosses. "Of course" - say Chineese. And replace brushless motor with cheap brushed one, assuming that manager understand that cheaper price means lower quality. Drill still looks the same for manager, and he mistakingly think that he participate in some Middle-East-like bargain about the price. But he does not. "What about cheaper price?" - asks manager, thinking he successfully pushing that stupid Cheneese and begin to dream about spending huge bonus he will get on return. "OK" - say Chineese and replace battery cells with some cheap crap. Customer know better, it's obvious, that no sane person will assume than cheaper thing will be made from same parts as normal one. Customer looks clever man, so he know what he is doing.
And so on. Manager sign the deal for total crap for as cheap as possible. This hand drill looks exactly like normal one, until you get it in hands. Manager boss don't care about that, he counting his profit. Manager gets bonus. Hand drill appear on shop shelves for the normal hand drill price. And when customer buy that crap for the price of normal drill, it is somehow Chineese are cheaters, no way it is that fucking boss, and his manager who got exactly what he paid for.
That simple. Of course there are literal swindlers among Chineese, like in any other nation, but rarely manufacturers do that. IDK, may be if you will insist on the price cheaper than anything possible, you may be get some non-working mockup filled with sand and stones, but that is exactly what you wanted declaring your price.
When I meet some "cheated" by Chineese customers, say somebody bought powerbank for $5 and found out that its capacity 10 times less than he wanted, then I ask, why did he think that he will get something that cost $50 for $5? It's not Chineese fault that he is so greedy and stupid to not be responsible for his own choice,
I think elites are in panic. And definitely not laughing. Their masters deadline is closer and closer, and they did nothing they promised. So they do random insane shit in hope to at least partially satisfy their real masters when deadline come. Looks they are completely fucked and desperate, And it is much more dangerous for us.
I don't think this could last long enough. And I don't think our species future is so grim. Breakthroughs happens when things come completely fucked, and then things get better. We (as humanity) are simply not fucked enough to begin to think. But we are already fucked enough to began to notice. And it is very good that we notice, this means we are still sane and intelligent enough to notice.
IDK, may be soon some genius find out some decent solution, or there will be some technological breakthrough that will solve some key problems, but I'm not as pessimistic as you.
It's definitely a problem that people are not interested in doing their best and getting high quality and have replaced the 'best' with the easiest money.
Shortsighted, greedy decision makers who choose profit over quality are definitely a large part of the problem. It costs what it costs, and haggling is not negotiation.
Haggling is terrible because ultimately it is about making it worse for the other person most of the time and has nothing to do with reality.
We need to take real pride in our work, but that is hard when the company itself doesn't want to pass along the profits to their employees who make them money by working hard and not taking shortcuts.
Bad business....it's really to blame. But I wouldn't say capitalism is at fault. Greed is not a side effect of capitalism...it exists in all economic systems from what I have seen.
Communists are greedy too.
The banking system, MMT, and the constant printing of money for oligarchs doesn't help promote real work or quality either sadly
Of course greed is not side effect of capitalism. Probllem is that existing version of capitalism encourage greed.
Socialism (at least USSR implementation) had drawback with quality, and reason is other than greed. Quality is not important in socialism, because there is no any motivation for quality in regular manufacturing. It does not matter, will something be crappy or high-quality, in any case reward will be the same, output will be consumed in any case, and broken crap will be replaced with another crap. No any reason for anybody to strive for quality. There was exceptions, of course, but it was for high-tech or military things where quality is a must. For regular goods quality was just irrelevant.
So both, known socialism and capitalism does not encourage quality. Add to that customer stupidity and effect of marketing, and we are completely fucked.
Most troubling thing that this situaltion with quality could not be attributed to some evil elites or whatever. It is inherent problem of any known system ever implemented in reality.
Yet another thing in this rabbit hole. Imagine economy that produce things only of exceptional quality. Obviously, such economy will need much less manufacturing. Car you dad bought will serve your grand kids, no need to replace your home appliances from time to time and so on. Manufacturing will be needed only to supply population grow and rare replacement, say after natural disasters or accidents. But for whatever reason finding such economy is not among the goals of all that "sustainability", "green" crowd. On the opposite - they want one-time-use "biodegradeable" goods economy with obvious enormous manufacturing. And it is not about profits, quality driven economy could be as profitable, as any other one, just with another structure of profits.
Weird. There is definitely something big in that "quality driven economy" question we run into in our conversation.