I have some Chinese friends who work in QA for an American company (visiting factories and such) and who do an amazing job, and I wish more American shoppers kn

I have some Chinese friends who work in QA for an American company (visiting factories and such) and who do an amazing job, and I wish more American shoppers knew about this. These are really good people who care about high-quality goods. They are well-educated native-speakers and they can spot cut corners a mile away. When you buy a $4 bikini you are taking a quality-related risk though, and a lot of the time, shoppers are correctly aiming for quantity, not quality. Personally, if I buy a $4 anything direct from China I know I'm taking that quality risk, but it's prospective risk: Periodically I want to broaden my horizons and check to see whether I'm being gouged or not, or just see if I can let my buddies know about something that is worth it at a surprisingly low cost. Given a product category that's been around for a while, that's important if you'll be buying a lot of stuff in that category. I do this sometimes with simple electronic components, antennas, things like that. However in most cases the original/heavy-QA item is obviously way better, and in the case of electronics, maybe it's made in the _exact_ same factory, but the firmware, materials, and overall quality is simply worlds ahead of the afterthought/low-QA product. Yaesu released the FT-4X and FT-65 radios which are a great example of this, made in the same factory but far superior to the Chinese-brand radios (I own both and use them frequently). Nagoya and Comet and Diamond antennas "can" be cheaply replicated but surprisingly given such simple parameters, the result is periodically complete junk. But much of the time, it's not complete junk. It's in the middle somewhere. So the question becomes: Would I like "good enough" and _three of them_ (like three antennas for several radios), or "best on the market" and one of them. I personally find that I have some "best of market" needs like participating in a local emergency exercise, and in other cases maybe I just enjoy a low-key hobby and having access to just-OK equipment means I can string multiple devices together and have some broad-minded fun as opposed to the deeper, quality-focused type. IMO it's good for consumers to know about both mindsets, and yet I think many more do get this than the HN crowd will credit. American companies were also warned of this shift long ago and a lot of them sure seem to be doing OK maintaining their competitive advantage. We are now in the information age and America is a cultural-informational dominator.