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Far richer, but with less plastic junk that has to be thrown away in a few months.
by iratewizard 5y ago
Far richer, but with less plastic junk that has to be thrown away in a few months.
- alephnan 5y ago> far richer In so far that there would not be supply chain issues causing massive inflation? How would Amazon, Apple, the world’s richest companies be so without China?
- kevin_thibedeau 5y agoThey could all be running operations in Mexico. That could have become the North American SZ.
- alephnan 5y ago> They This embeds a colonialist / Western bias presuming that Americans companies are leading the charge and orchestrating everything, and the natives are incapable of self organizing. This is opposed to American companies being customers, and Chinese companies offering them a cheap all inclusive solution with implementation details ( factories / labor ) already sorted out. Since you pointed out Shen Zhen specifically.
- kevin_thibedeau 5y agoMexico would ultimately benefit from more investment. Throw in the trillions the US has wasted on nation building elsewhere and the Americas could have been built into having much stronger public institutions. It's not like Western Europe doesn't leverage its eastern neighbors and North Africa for cheaper labor.
- pharke 5y agoEveryone always goes straight to outsourced manual labor as a solution. It's a bad solution. If we weren't a nation run by corrupt middle managers trying to inflate their own salaries and sense of purpose we'd have stuck with the tried and true method of innovating on the manufacturing process itself making it more automated and less dependent on human labor. Human labor is always slow, prone to mistakes, and expensive. It's the favorite tool of the incompetent. If you think that's wrong then ask yourself which is better, harvesting a field with 100 workers with hand tools or with 1 farmer and a tractor?
- iratewizard 5y agoChina also doesn't share our value of craftsmanship. By letting them own a portion of our supply chain, they own a lot more than just the manual labor. They put us in situations where measuring temperature means buying an antique mercury thermometer, buying a $400 nist certified alcohol one, or getting Chinese made garbage that is not accurate within 2°.
- alephnan 5y ago> China also doesn't share our value of craftsmanship Obviously we share theirs since we’ve shown were interested in cutting costs at the expense of quality.
- Ekaros 5y agoThey could make quality long last products. But in general both as individuals and as society in general from companies to government value cost cutting and short term profit most. So ofc what gets made and sold is the cheapest possible product that is still passable at time of sale.
- lostlogin 5y agoLots of plastic junk comes out of China, but the good stuff does too. I checked where a newly arrived superconducting magnet was made when purchased from a German vendor - China.
- alephnan 5y agoAnker products as well.