11 ms·

china is not going to ever respect western patents. people need to get this through their thick skulls. if your company is not compatible with china existing, o

china is not going to ever respect western patents. people need to get this through their thick skulls. if your company is not compatible with china existing, one of these things is going away, and it isn't china. the madder you get, the less they care. they're on the other side of the planet and have their own system. they're not even thinking about you as they go about their business. i swear it's like the collective west just infinite-loops through the stages of grief when it comes to china even existing. and to those of you who think "well we have to do something about it" -- yeah, the west has been "doing something" about it for hundreds of years. various tactics, strategies, wars, colonialism, both pro- and anti- whatever regime is in power. none of it works long term.

ChrisKnott 3y ago
Stealing IP is basically a blue shell. At some point probably China will be leading tech innovation and the West will have little incentive to respect their patents.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- samtho 3y ago
  I just can’t see the PRC and the CCP in its current form sticking around long enough. Between their demographic collapse and pushback on globalization amongst some of the largest nations and economic zones who trade with China (not the mention China imports most of its food), we will see the CCP take an even firmer grasp just before it either collapses or disintegrates. We will likely see the largest cities revert to self-governance and then we will have a better understanding of the geopolitical landscape in which we will all operate in. If Hong Kong‘s economic and political influence positions it to self-govern once again, perhaps taking much of Guangdong with it, we may see more respect for global IP protections.
  - solardev 3y ago
    Is fragmenting into city states more likely than the CCP continuing to change, as it has over the past few decades? Chinese cultural identity, centered around Han dominance and collectivism, has been a unifying force for quite some time. HK was a major exception because of British influence, but I have a hard time seeing the rest of the country willingly breaking up rather than just slowly forcing through change.
  - inconceivable 3y ago
    ground breaking novel analysis: china is going to collapse any day now. for real this time. maybe if we keep repeating it enough, it will happen.
  - dirtyid 3y ago
    PRC global trade increased by 1 trillion with a T in the last 4 years, more than the prior 10 years. That's the greatest expansion in globalism... ever. Most with the global south, some of which is redirected trade to western block who realized they can't decouple but only derisk while the PRC has increased global integration more than... ever. Meanwhile PRC is moving from 25% skilled workforce to 60/70/80% like an advanced economy by spamming ~5M stem per year - for next 20-30 years they'll be reaping the greatest concentrated pool of skilled labour demographic dividend... also ever. Maybe post 2060s demography will be an issue like JP whose problem is they couldn't replace skilled labour at parity and even then they just merely stayed... very competitive. That's what a PRC "collapse" will look like, a massive Japan (as in multiple Japans) where median projection paints 2100 PRC as the second largest country with a skilled workforce many times larger than 2023 PRC. Conveniently, also one that doesn't have to import calories/energy. That's the problem with focusing only on the demographic pyramid and not actual demographic workforce composition. Yes PRC will have demographic challenges, but demographic trends also point toward overwhelming PRC global competitiveness and geopolitical security.
    - samtho 3y ago
      PRC global trade is propped up by extremely low-value, often non-essential goods on the export side and they import much of very essential food supplies and some other raw materials to make these goods. We have already seen a shift in manufacturing to Mexico which benefits the US with a skilled labor force enjoying low CoL, all within the North American free trade zone. Low-end semiconductor manufacturing is one of the last essential things the world imports from China, but much of this is already moving to Vietnam. Medium to high-end semiconductor manufacturing largely takes place in Japan, Taiwan, and the United States - all of which are allied together and will respect export restrictions. We will see Germany (another ally) step in once their fabrication facilities are complete and operational, maybe by 2026. Calling their wide-scale demographic collapse as merely “challenges” is disingenuous. This is a looming complete and total catastrophe that will spark a humanitarian crisis, the likes of which the world has not seen before. Their short-sighted one child policy they had into place from 1979 to 2015 has robbed them of more than half of their 30-40 year olds, people at their prime working age, just as their parents are entering retirement. The legal obligation of children to take care of their parents in their old age had put additional burden on the single child of each parental union. These adult children are putting off having a family of their own due to this. This cycle continues. And this is just the stuff we know about. We likely won’t even know how many people died of COVID-19, what are the figures of major events that we don’t even know about? Disinformation campaigns stamp out people speaking ill China, but when all this comes to a head, it will seem sudden but will the crescendo of compounding events, falling onto the next like dominos.
- solardev 3y ago
  It's not even the same system though. When some Chinese company gets big enough, they just get partially or wholly subsumed by the government in a quasi-nationalization. IP and patents don't have much meaning in such a system. They aren't even much protected from themselves, much less from foreign pirates. They're not quite communist but they don't protect individual property rights to the same degree that we do. If we stole their designs they'd probably just shrug, but we'd still have to contend with our own laws and domestic competitors and international trade agreements with other Western nations, while they just continue on their merry way, growing and growing while securing logistics and supply routes from a bunch of small countries and mines. At the end of the day, their system can more efficiently organize national production around some shared goal. Ours allows more independent experimentation and a faster pace of innovation. But once they have their minds set on something, collectively, I don't think our market would be able to keep pace unless we keep being able to technologically leapfrog them. But that can only last for so long, especially as our education continues to weaken...
  - msla 3y ago
    > At the end of the day, their system can more efficiently organize national production around some shared goal. That sounds like propaganda. Oligopolies are historically hilariously inefficient, and China's brain drain hardly seems like it portends well for them: https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinas-brain-drain-threatens-its-future-dbe38096 https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinas-brain-drain-threatens-it... https://archive.ph/ACMyG https://archive.ph/ACMyG https://web.archive.org/web/20170225132236/http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/01/world/asia/wary-of-future-many-professionals-leave-china.html?pagewanted=all https://web.archive.org/web/20170225132236/http://www.nytime... https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/china-s-millionaire-exodus-as-wealthy-flee-with-america-the-preferred-destination-9069551.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/china-s-millio...
    - dirtyid 3y ago
      PRC state driven industrial policies are hilariously efficient against entrenched (western) incumbants, because the alternative is to not be competitive at all since new competitors simply can't compete against moat of established western companies with resources that rival government funding, no less US cheap money. PRC scale is large enough to do that, meanwhile most countries/blocs too small or uncoordinated to even try. That's why US/west copying PRC industrial policies, because PRC industrial policy is initially "inefficient", and then they become absurdly efficient, saturating domestic market at first, then export massive surplus to globe, and eats away at western shares. Analysis of PRC moving up value chain and global export share on PV, telecom, android smartphone, display panel shows reduction in operating margin of leading companies by 50-90%. Hence US is trying to stop PRC semi. And I'm guessing west on PRC EV soon. Because the efficiency of PRC indy policy is also measured in making western companies less productive. As for PRC brain drain, Chinese academics/talent in west floating back to PRC in record numbers. Those are good portends vs statistically insignificant % of millionaires trying to hide their money abroad. Which entire ignores the fact that PRC generates so much domestic talent now that west can't meaningfuly braindrain even if they wanted to. PRC is in process of milking the greatest high skill demographic divident in recorded history. It took PRC 20 years to build up ~15M STEM talent to catch up in west in most sectors except extremely difficult integration projects like aviation and semi. She's generating that much talent every 3-4 years now. E: over post limit Yet the west copies PRC, an "unserious" regime, none the less. From PRC content moderation, to surveillance, to industrial policies, there's more convergence than divergence. Because PRC is prescient. Enough so to be labelled as only US competitor who is capable of reshaping global order.
- dirtyid 3y ago
  Which is IMO fine for PRC since it's manufacturing base can always out compete west on cost. The real issue is IP law protects incumbents, predominantly western companies. Stats from a few years ago was PRC was paying $6 in IP to US for every $1 it took. It's a rigged game with rules made by west to benefit west. It's unsustainable. As PRC catches up, would it like a world where their IP gets respected? Yes, but the second best is a world where western IP gets increasingly ignored because that deals disproportionate damage to those with most profitable IP portfolios.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- balloonthief 3y ago
  It's a tale as old as trade itself, and the US was just as guilty in its infancy: https://theworld.org/stories/2014-02-18/us-complains-other-nations-are-stealing-us-technology-america-has-history https://theworld.org/stories/2014-02-18/us-complains-other-n...
- kmeisthax 3y ago
  Prusa's comments here are very important. In this specific case, China is not "stealing intellectual property" in the sense that they are using it without a license; they are literally stealing title to the inventions in question, which is way worse. Of course, the obvious solution would be to not respect international patent priority from China, but that is tantamount to fighting a trade war, which has significant strategic implications. You can't sue the US to force them to de-normalize trade relations with China for the same reason why you can't sue the US to force the army to nuke China.
- doublespanner 3y ago
  It's not easy to go from catching up to leading... Maybe China can but it seems far more likely that they are destined to settle in a few miles behind the west like the rest of the Asian tigers.
daniel_reetz 3y ago
Also, this is OSHW - Open Source Hardware - a _copyright_ based license, U.S. copyright does not protect hardware. Patents are a whole other subject. This article is about Open Hardware being abused, not patents. I stopped working on OSHW because it can't protect hardware. It has no legal teeth. Better to just give it away (public domain or whatever).
- blackguardx 3y ago
  Hardware can be copyrighted, but it only protects the PCB layout.
- kayfox 3y ago
  > U.S. copyright does not protect hardware. It does, it specifically protects chip die masks and by implication and case law protects PCB layouts and circuit diagrams.
mschuster91 3y ago
> china is not going to ever respect western patents. people need to get this through their thick skulls. China can do whatever the f..k they want. The problem is our own governments: they could and should have sanctioned the country to oblivion... had they not foolishly tied their entire nations to the success of China. We all allowed, hell we welcomed Chinese products in our markets because our population got a decade or two of cheap Chinese made crap products which helped to hide wage stagnation (and rich CEOs getting ever richer). Then we got addicted, a ton of jobs got shipped off to China, here in Germany they stripped an entire mining facility and sent it overseas [1], and far-right parties fed themselves fat on the resulting economic devastation. And then we went even more foolish and sat idly by as our car companies completely ignored the domestic market and only focused on growing in China... with the predictable fuck-up that China learned how to make cheap EVs and now our industry is at the curb of collapsing against cheap Chinese cars and no competent competition bar Tesla. [1] https://www.nd-aktuell.de/artikel/205443.vom-ruhrgebiet-nach-china.html https://www.nd-aktuell.de/artikel/205443.vom-ruhrgebiet-nach...
- leidenfrost 3y ago
  The problem is that first world labor is totally overpriced and their lifestyle is simply unsustainable. 20 years ago it "could" be justified by selling the idea that American or European labor is light years away in terms of quality compared to Chinese or any developing country's labor. And that may still be true, but the gap has shrunk in size by a lot. To the point that corporations may not want to pay 120k or 200k a year for something that can be made in a developing country for 20k a year and with ~80% of the quality.
  - mschuster91 3y ago
    > The problem is that first world labor is totally overpriced and their lifestyle is simply unsustainable. The thing is, the comparatively high labor cost in Western countries is so high because we can actually have a life on it and feed a bunch of uber rich people with our labor and taxes (because guess what, people like Warren Buffett and his ilk pay a ridiculously low tax rate [1] compared to legitimately employed working class people). In contrast, China, India, Thailand or Vietnam can offer very cheap labor because for the people there even utter pittances and absolutely ridiculous exploitation are better than the life these people had before. While I do support the efforts China and India both have committed to lifting literally a billion of people out of utter poverty, it has at the same time brought disastrous consequences on our own society. I'd be happier with globalization if we had forced importers of any good to make sure that wages, labor conditions and environmental impact were on par with domestic regulations because the status quo is exploitation on all levels to benefit Western oligarchs (and imagine how the life of Chinese factory workers would be with Western wages!). [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/08/bezos-musk-buffett-bloomberg-icahn-and-soros-pay-little-in-taxes.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/08/bezos-musk-buffett-bloomberg...
thomastjeffery 3y ago
In other words, intellectual property does not work. That era ended a while ago, and the west is still playing pretend.
- disintegore 3y ago
  It was always a farce to begin with. Inventing scarcity where there is none because there was zero willingness to organize production around anything other than markets. It was a bad but understandably necessary move back when the printing press was invented. Centuries later, with practically instant and practically infinite reproduction of most types of information, it's pure insanity.
  - thomastjeffery 3y ago
    It was workable when there was a real cost associated with reproduction. Everyone knew it was arbitrary social scaffolding, but it was stable enough for society to keep it standing. Now that scaffold has no real foundation, save for a handful of gigantic corporations holding on as tightly as they can, and punishing anyone who dares contradict them.
- yarg 3y ago
  It can't work if you're willing to engage with bad faith players, and are unwilling to call them out for their bullshit. China has been depending on industrial espionage in order to keep up for decades now. Punish them for their malfeasance. The way that the west works is far from ideal, but limited term intellectual property protection provides a significant portion of the motivation for the creation of novel products. Without those protections, and the products that depend on them, there won't even be designs for China to steal. Of course, there is a very valid argument that we don't actually need a lot of that shit, regardless of who's making it.
  - thomastjeffery 3y ago
    > call them out Oh, that's been done plenty. They don't care. Now what...escalate? That's been done, too. Hell, that was probably Trump's biggest campaign promise. Obviously it didn't work. So how far should we keep escalating? Do we declare war over intellectual property? Fuck that. It's time to wake up. We are the ones being called out on our bullshit. China called our bluff, and we are left holding the cards. There is no sense in waiting around: we should fold ASAP.
oytis 3y ago
> the west has been "doing something" about it for hundreds of years. various tactics, strategies, wars, colonialism, both pro- and anti- whatever regime is in power. none of it works long term. Come on, China was pretty irrelevant to the outside world until the US started pumping money into it in the 70s. That's exactly what the West should stop doing.
- inconceivable 3y ago
  the reason you are so confused is because your assumption that china just popped into existence fully-formed in 1945 or whatever, is totally and utterly wrong and ignores literally hundreds if not thousands of years of relevant history. literally everyone has tried to take over china (modern translation: "access their markets"), from the mongols to the british to the japanese. i bet even the romans had some half-assed plan they were working on.
  - cracrecry 3y ago
    >literally everyone has tried to take over china (modern translation: "access their markets"), from the mongols to the british to the japanese. i bet even the romans had some half-assed plan they were working on. China was an Empire because they tried(and succeeded) taking over neighbours by force, including Mongols and Japanese. To portray Chinese like saints or victims is not knowing about the thousands of years you talk about.
    - cyberax 3y ago
      > China was an Empire because they tried(and succeeded) taking over neighbours by force, including Mongols and Japanese. Uhm... You clearly have no idea about China. First, it was _itself_ conquered by Mongols ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongol_conquest_of_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongol_conquest_of_China ). Who were then simply assimilated. Second, China has never conquered Japan. Overall, China has been remarkably non-aggressive.
      - disintegore 3y ago

ChrisKnott 3y ago

Stealing IP is basically a blue shell. At some point probably China will be leading tech innovation and the West will have little incentive to respect their patents.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
samtho 3y ago
I just can’t see the PRC and the CCP in its current form sticking around long enough. Between their demographic collapse and pushback on globalization amongst some of the largest nations and economic zones who trade with China (not the mention China imports most of its food), we will see the CCP take an even firmer grasp just before it either collapses or disintegrates. We will likely see the largest cities revert to self-governance and then we will have a better understanding of the geopolitical landscape in which we will all operate in. If Hong Kong‘s economic and political influence positions it to self-govern once again, perhaps taking much of Guangdong with it, we may see more respect for global IP protections.
- solardev 3y ago
  Is fragmenting into city states more likely than the CCP continuing to change, as it has over the past few decades? Chinese cultural identity, centered around Han dominance and collectivism, has been a unifying force for quite some time. HK was a major exception because of British influence, but I have a hard time seeing the rest of the country willingly breaking up rather than just slowly forcing through change.
- inconceivable 3y ago
  ground breaking novel analysis: china is going to collapse any day now. for real this time. maybe if we keep repeating it enough, it will happen.
- dirtyid 3y ago
  PRC global trade increased by 1 trillion with a T in the last 4 years, more than the prior 10 years. That's the greatest expansion in globalism... ever. Most with the global south, some of which is redirected trade to western block who realized they can't decouple but only derisk while the PRC has increased global integration more than... ever. Meanwhile PRC is moving from 25% skilled workforce to 60/70/80% like an advanced economy by spamming ~5M stem per year - for next 20-30 years they'll be reaping the greatest concentrated pool of skilled labour demographic dividend... also ever. Maybe post 2060s demography will be an issue like JP whose problem is they couldn't replace skilled labour at parity and even then they just merely stayed... very competitive. That's what a PRC "collapse" will look like, a massive Japan (as in multiple Japans) where median projection paints 2100 PRC as the second largest country with a skilled workforce many times larger than 2023 PRC. Conveniently, also one that doesn't have to import calories/energy. That's the problem with focusing only on the demographic pyramid and not actual demographic workforce composition. Yes PRC will have demographic challenges, but demographic trends also point toward overwhelming PRC global competitiveness and geopolitical security.
  - samtho 3y ago
    PRC global trade is propped up by extremely low-value, often non-essential goods on the export side and they import much of very essential food supplies and some other raw materials to make these goods. We have already seen a shift in manufacturing to Mexico which benefits the US with a skilled labor force enjoying low CoL, all within the North American free trade zone. Low-end semiconductor manufacturing is one of the last essential things the world imports from China, but much of this is already moving to Vietnam. Medium to high-end semiconductor manufacturing largely takes place in Japan, Taiwan, and the United States - all of which are allied together and will respect export restrictions. We will see Germany (another ally) step in once their fabrication facilities are complete and operational, maybe by 2026. Calling their wide-scale demographic collapse as merely “challenges” is disingenuous. This is a looming complete and total catastrophe that will spark a humanitarian crisis, the likes of which the world has not seen before. Their short-sighted one child policy they had into place from 1979 to 2015 has robbed them of more than half of their 30-40 year olds, people at their prime working age, just as their parents are entering retirement. The legal obligation of children to take care of their parents in their old age had put additional burden on the single child of each parental union. These adult children are putting off having a family of their own due to this. This cycle continues. And this is just the stuff we know about. We likely won’t even know how many people died of COVID-19, what are the figures of major events that we don’t even know about? Disinformation campaigns stamp out people speaking ill China, but when all this comes to a head, it will seem sudden but will the crescendo of compounding events, falling onto the next like dominos.
solardev 3y ago
It's not even the same system though. When some Chinese company gets big enough, they just get partially or wholly subsumed by the government in a quasi-nationalization. IP and patents don't have much meaning in such a system. They aren't even much protected from themselves, much less from foreign pirates. They're not quite communist but they don't protect individual property rights to the same degree that we do. If we stole their designs they'd probably just shrug, but we'd still have to contend with our own laws and domestic competitors and international trade agreements with other Western nations, while they just continue on their merry way, growing and growing while securing logistics and supply routes from a bunch of small countries and mines. At the end of the day, their system can more efficiently organize national production around some shared goal. Ours allows more independent experimentation and a faster pace of innovation. But once they have their minds set on something, collectively, I don't think our market would be able to keep pace unless we keep being able to technologically leapfrog them. But that can only last for so long, especially as our education continues to weaken...
- msla 3y ago
  > At the end of the day, their system can more efficiently organize national production around some shared goal. That sounds like propaganda. Oligopolies are historically hilariously inefficient, and China's brain drain hardly seems like it portends well for them: https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinas-brain-drain-threatens-its-future-dbe38096 https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinas-brain-drain-threatens-it... https://archive.ph/ACMyG https://archive.ph/ACMyG https://web.archive.org/web/20170225132236/http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/01/world/asia/wary-of-future-many-professionals-leave-china.html?pagewanted=all https://web.archive.org/web/20170225132236/http://www.nytime... https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/china-s-millionaire-exodus-as-wealthy-flee-with-america-the-preferred-destination-9069551.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/china-s-millio...
  - dirtyid 3y ago
    PRC state driven industrial policies are hilariously efficient against entrenched (western) incumbants, because the alternative is to not be competitive at all since new competitors simply can't compete against moat of established western companies with resources that rival government funding, no less US cheap money. PRC scale is large enough to do that, meanwhile most countries/blocs too small or uncoordinated to even try. That's why US/west copying PRC industrial policies, because PRC industrial policy is initially "inefficient", and then they become absurdly efficient, saturating domestic market at first, then export massive surplus to globe, and eats away at western shares. Analysis of PRC moving up value chain and global export share on PV, telecom, android smartphone, display panel shows reduction in operating margin of leading companies by 50-90%. Hence US is trying to stop PRC semi. And I'm guessing west on PRC EV soon. Because the efficiency of PRC indy policy is also measured in making western companies less productive. As for PRC brain drain, Chinese academics/talent in west floating back to PRC in record numbers. Those are good portends vs statistically insignificant % of millionaires trying to hide their money abroad. Which entire ignores the fact that PRC generates so much domestic talent now that west can't meaningfuly braindrain even if they wanted to. PRC is in process of milking the greatest high skill demographic divident in recorded history. It took PRC 20 years to build up ~15M STEM talent to catch up in west in most sectors except extremely difficult integration projects like aviation and semi. She's generating that much talent every 3-4 years now. E: over post limit Yet the west copies PRC, an "unserious" regime, none the less. From PRC content moderation, to surveillance, to industrial policies, there's more convergence than divergence. Because PRC is prescient. Enough so to be labelled as only US competitor who is capable of reshaping global order.
dirtyid 3y ago
Which is IMO fine for PRC since it's manufacturing base can always out compete west on cost. The real issue is IP law protects incumbents, predominantly western companies. Stats from a few years ago was PRC was paying $6 in IP to US for every $1 it took. It's a rigged game with rules made by west to benefit west. It's unsustainable. As PRC catches up, would it like a world where their IP gets respected? Yes, but the second best is a world where western IP gets increasingly ignored because that deals disproportionate damage to those with most profitable IP portfolios.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
balloonthief 3y ago
It's a tale as old as trade itself, and the US was just as guilty in its infancy: https://theworld.org/stories/2014-02-18/us-complains-other-nations-are-stealing-us-technology-america-has-history https://theworld.org/stories/2014-02-18/us-complains-other-n...
kmeisthax 3y ago
Prusa's comments here are very important. In this specific case, China is not "stealing intellectual property" in the sense that they are using it without a license; they are literally stealing title to the inventions in question, which is way worse. Of course, the obvious solution would be to not respect international patent priority from China, but that is tantamount to fighting a trade war, which has significant strategic implications. You can't sue the US to force them to de-normalize trade relations with China for the same reason why you can't sue the US to force the army to nuke China.
doublespanner 3y ago
It's not easy to go from catching up to leading... Maybe China can but it seems far more likely that they are destined to settle in a few miles behind the west like the rest of the Asian tigers.

daniel_reetz 3y ago

Also, this is OSHW - Open Source Hardware - a _copyright_ based license, U.S. copyright does not protect hardware. Patents are a whole other subject. This article is about Open Hardware being abused, not patents. I stopped working on OSHW because it can't protect hardware. It has no legal teeth. Better to just give it away (public domain or whatever).

blackguardx 3y ago
Hardware can be copyrighted, but it only protects the PCB layout.
kayfox 3y ago
> U.S. copyright does not protect hardware. It does, it specifically protects chip die masks and by implication and case law protects PCB layouts and circuit diagrams.

mschuster91 3y ago

> china is not going to ever respect western patents. people need to get this through their thick skulls. China can do whatever the f..k they want. The problem is our own governments: they could and should have sanctioned the country to oblivion... had they not foolishly tied their entire nations to the success of China. We all allowed, hell we welcomed Chinese products in our markets because our population got a decade or two of cheap Chinese made crap products which helped to hide wage stagnation (and rich CEOs getting ever richer). Then we got addicted, a ton of jobs got shipped off to China, here in Germany they stripped an entire mining facility and sent it overseas [1], and far-right parties fed themselves fat on the resulting economic devastation. And then we went even more foolish and sat idly by as our car companies completely ignored the domestic market and only focused on growing in China... with the predictable fuck-up that China learned how to make cheap EVs and now our industry is at the curb of collapsing against cheap Chinese cars and no competent competition bar Tesla. [1] https://www.nd-aktuell.de/artikel/205443.vom-ruhrgebiet-nach-china.html https://www.nd-aktuell.de/artikel/205443.vom-ruhrgebiet-nach...

leidenfrost 3y ago
The problem is that first world labor is totally overpriced and their lifestyle is simply unsustainable. 20 years ago it "could" be justified by selling the idea that American or European labor is light years away in terms of quality compared to Chinese or any developing country's labor. And that may still be true, but the gap has shrunk in size by a lot. To the point that corporations may not want to pay 120k or 200k a year for something that can be made in a developing country for 20k a year and with ~80% of the quality.
- mschuster91 3y ago
  > The problem is that first world labor is totally overpriced and their lifestyle is simply unsustainable. The thing is, the comparatively high labor cost in Western countries is so high because we can actually have a life on it and feed a bunch of uber rich people with our labor and taxes (because guess what, people like Warren Buffett and his ilk pay a ridiculously low tax rate [1] compared to legitimately employed working class people). In contrast, China, India, Thailand or Vietnam can offer very cheap labor because for the people there even utter pittances and absolutely ridiculous exploitation are better than the life these people had before. While I do support the efforts China and India both have committed to lifting literally a billion of people out of utter poverty, it has at the same time brought disastrous consequences on our own society. I'd be happier with globalization if we had forced importers of any good to make sure that wages, labor conditions and environmental impact were on par with domestic regulations because the status quo is exploitation on all levels to benefit Western oligarchs (and imagine how the life of Chinese factory workers would be with Western wages!). [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/08/bezos-musk-buffett-bloomberg-icahn-and-soros-pay-little-in-taxes.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/08/bezos-musk-buffett-bloomberg...

thomastjeffery 3y ago

In other words, intellectual property does not work. That era ended a while ago, and the west is still playing pretend.

disintegore 3y ago
It was always a farce to begin with. Inventing scarcity where there is none because there was zero willingness to organize production around anything other than markets. It was a bad but understandably necessary move back when the printing press was invented. Centuries later, with practically instant and practically infinite reproduction of most types of information, it's pure insanity.
- thomastjeffery 3y ago
  It was workable when there was a real cost associated with reproduction. Everyone knew it was arbitrary social scaffolding, but it was stable enough for society to keep it standing. Now that scaffold has no real foundation, save for a handful of gigantic corporations holding on as tightly as they can, and punishing anyone who dares contradict them.
yarg 3y ago
It can't work if you're willing to engage with bad faith players, and are unwilling to call them out for their bullshit. China has been depending on industrial espionage in order to keep up for decades now. Punish them for their malfeasance. The way that the west works is far from ideal, but limited term intellectual property protection provides a significant portion of the motivation for the creation of novel products. Without those protections, and the products that depend on them, there won't even be designs for China to steal. Of course, there is a very valid argument that we don't actually need a lot of that shit, regardless of who's making it.
- thomastjeffery 3y ago
  > call them out Oh, that's been done plenty. They don't care. Now what...escalate? That's been done, too. Hell, that was probably Trump's biggest campaign promise. Obviously it didn't work. So how far should we keep escalating? Do we declare war over intellectual property? Fuck that. It's time to wake up. We are the ones being called out on our bullshit. China called our bluff, and we are left holding the cards. There is no sense in waiting around: we should fold ASAP.

oytis 3y ago

> the west has been "doing something" about it for hundreds of years. various tactics, strategies, wars, colonialism, both pro- and anti- whatever regime is in power. none of it works long term. Come on, China was pretty irrelevant to the outside world until the US started pumping money into it in the 70s. That's exactly what the West should stop doing.

inconceivable 3y ago
the reason you are so confused is because your assumption that china just popped into existence fully-formed in 1945 or whatever, is totally and utterly wrong and ignores literally hundreds if not thousands of years of relevant history. literally everyone has tried to take over china (modern translation: "access their markets"), from the mongols to the british to the japanese. i bet even the romans had some half-assed plan they were working on.
- cracrecry 3y ago
  >literally everyone has tried to take over china (modern translation: "access their markets"), from the mongols to the british to the japanese. i bet even the romans had some half-assed plan they were working on. China was an Empire because they tried(and succeeded) taking over neighbours by force, including Mongols and Japanese. To portray Chinese like saints or victims is not knowing about the thousands of years you talk about.
  - cyberax 3y ago
    > China was an Empire because they tried(and succeeded) taking over neighbours by force, including Mongols and Japanese. Uhm... You clearly have no idea about China. First, it was _itself_ conquered by Mongols ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongol_conquest_of_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongol_conquest_of_China ). Who were then simply assimilated. Second, China has never conquered Japan. Overall, China has been remarkably non-aggressive.
    - disintegore 3y ago