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.
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.