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Old craftsman tools and various other tools from 30-40 yrs ago have no competition with the current market as far as I'm aware. We sold excellence and reliabili
by thumbuddy 3y ago
Old craftsman tools and various other tools from 30-40 yrs ago have no competition with the current market as far as I'm aware. We sold excellence and reliability to the lowest bidder in almost every single industry. I'm under no illusions, america used to make some terrible products in the past too, but now days half this stuff,even the high end stuff, is designed to go into the trash in 1-6 months... Current lifetime warranties aren't offered because the tools are that good, it's because market research shows you won't even want another one...
Some Chinese tools are fine, but many of them are awful. I talk regularly with manufacturer types, even the raw materials(like steel or aluminum) that come from china can be super suspect.
It's basic economic warfare. China said "screw you, we will make okay enough things at a cheap price so your country loses all of its actual expertise and trades people work at call centers while manufacturing becomes entirely controlled by another country. We will do this at the cost of millions of our citizens for the greater good. Every design sent to us will be replicated and sold for less. Meanwhile we will send our young to your schools to get educated on how to do this better than you, half of PhD students are foreign nationals, and even if they stayed in the US there's no jobs".
Paying the piper in this regard is inevitable. As a country we encouraged everyone to take quick cost saving measures for decades. Germany and many other countries have not Basically our hope is we can cheaply wiggle free by "AI", and not hiring trained experts to do jobs with care and lower the costs by cutting regulations.
We sold every part of everything that mattered to get ahead short term not paying attention to the debt accrued.
- didntknowya 3y agoi dont get all these chinese finger pointing- they did not force US businesses into non-competes or exclusivity contracts. businesses shifted to china in the name of pure profit. they closed their local factories and laid off their expert staffs due to short sightedness.
- jacquesm 3y agoI do to the extent that the Chinese will often substitute inferior materials and processes if they think they can get away with it. Documented cases of bait-and-switch between prototypes and early runs on the component, sub assembly and sometimes entire products abound. That's not the way the West normally does business so a whole pile of QC needs to be added to make sure that contractual obligations are fulfilled rather than that non-functional similar shaped and colored stuff gets substituted for the real thing. This is a massive problem, especially in industries where there isn't a whole lot of margin for error (say, aviation).
- thumbuddy 3y agoWell let's be real, that same thing happens in the US and would happen more in the US if we owned the means of manufacture. Infact, I bet a lot of money it'd be more prevalent until new laws were drafted protecting things. Plot twist our current laws are eroding at a rapid rate...
- mikrotikker 3y ago> that same thing happens in the US and would happen more in the US if we owned the means of manufacture I doubt that very much.
- thumbuddy 3y agoHave you ever worked in an American industry that makes physical products? Let me give you a hint, it's got the same pressures as software engineering but it's often harder, the environments can be twenty degrees above room temp, and the people get paid a hardly liveable wage. You can doubt it all you want, but people are out there cutting corners like no tomorrow in pretty much every industry you can Imagine. Usually it's not the employees idea, but rather middle/upper management. Some of the products people buy have basically never been tested. Yep. Even high end expensive equipment. I'd say more but I'd rather not...
- thumbuddy 3y agoI have zero intention of villianizing china. The point was to say, they were smart and employed long term strategies for survival and success. Now they have us pretty much rapped around their finger like how cloud vendors have us locked in. It's not bad, or evil, it's business we accept every day and are too divided to correct.
- mikrotikker 3y agoYea take a look at Thousand Currents Programme, now called the National Front Work Programme and you will see the villainy that China undertakes at the govts behest.