> Guess this is what happens when Western lawmakers sell out domestic manufacturing because some dickhead MBAs said it would be "efficient". One could make a m

> Guess this is what happens when Western lawmakers sell out domestic manufacturing because some dickhead MBAs said it would be "efficient". One could make a more charitable interpretation than that. It has been an observed strategy of the modern western world to transition from physical labor as an asset to “IP”; i.e. immaterial rights (mostly copyrights and patents), as an asset. One could charitably then guess that law and policy makers might have envisioned the western world as, like Joel Spolsky once said, “a trendy couple sipping Chardonnay in their living room outsourcing everything”¹. Joel was talking about companies, but the analogy can be stretched to entire countries. The strategy didn’t work as well as they hoped, obviously, since IP rights depend on laws, and sovereign nations are ultimately not beholden to laws. The strategy still worked somewhat, only, I think, because a Chinese company can’t just create a popular product and sell it in the west (although they are getting better all the time, like how Amazon is filled to the brim with pseudo-brand junk). There’s something fundamentally missing there, like how hardware companies can’t write good software to save their lives, and mostly vice versa. This fact has allowed the west to cling to the dream of Chardonnay long enough to survive until today, when we can finally see the first really big drawbacks of not having control of your own production and supply chains. 1. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/10/14/in-defense-of-not-invented-here-syndrome/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/10/14/in-defense-of-not-...