9 ms·

I've noticed that there's currently some kind of manufacturing consent going on in the EU, presumably preparing the population for, which I claim, plans to make

by sva_ 1y ago

I've noticed that there's currently some kind of manufacturing consent going on in the EU, presumably preparing the population for, which I claim, plans to make it very difficult for European consumers to order from China directly. Disclaimer: I gladly buy from local EU businesses, but not if they're just a middleman charging an unreasonable fee for importing Chinese-made products.

seec 1y ago
The sad truth is that the majority of common products are like this and the markup is for covering the insane amount of bullshit job to run the bureaucracy enabling this. Which is exactly why they are trying to close the "loophole", if the poor people can go directly to the source, big government can't put its hand in every single process to tax it in order to pay for all the bullshit. The industry is complicit because they get to make more profit this way, the whole system is corrupted anyway. As for the things that are made in the EU, they are barely affordable for the middle class already, precisely because there is very little value creation and it's get taxed to the ground. The ones suffering the most are the poor, who are often the ones actually working to create said value, preventing access to those cheap goods is just another way to force them to stay poor.
seydor 1y ago
i d be surprised if this wasn't some "influence" coming from the US administration for my part i am ordering lots of trinkets that i might need, assuming that Temu will be banned soon
- userbinator 1y ago
  The EU and US have historically been very much opposites, and now increasingly more so, when it comes to things like this.
  - cjbgkagh 1y ago
    The US is gearing up for a China conflict, there is a split between the prep for war with China now or sort out Iran first and then prep for war with China. It’s currently most obvious in the MAGA split but the dems are captured as well. AOC is signaling she’ll play ball in what I assume is prep for a presidential run. Like most voters I’m anti-war but people tend not to get what they vote for in important matters like that. The US will not permit the EU to sit on the sidelines.
    - TheOtherHobbes 1y ago
      By 2027, the EU will be too busy fighting Russia to help much with China. Meanwhile the US has far too little independent industrial manufacturing left. All of its super-expensive weapons systems need components and raw materials - especially rare earths - imported from China. The US has a huge stockpile of weapons which are incredibly vulnerable to sneak drone attacks. It has neither the talent, the resources, nor the industrial capacity to build replacements quickly at scale, never mind mass produce the drone swarm armies that will win the next war. I'm not a huge fan of empires, but I wouldn't be at all surprised to see China become the sole remaining superpower within ten years - before starting its own inevitable decay into corruption and psychopathy.
      - redeeman 1y ago
        > By 2027, the EU will be too busy fighting Russia to help much with China. you think the EU will declare war with russia? they will not do it formally, but who knows if they will send troops. you think russia will invade attempt to EU? if so, you're delusional
      - cjbgkagh 1y ago
        I try to explain to people the absolute absurd state of affairs that refined high quality goods are often cheaper from China than it is to import the raw materials. Our financialized economy is dependent on cheep Chinese goods and dodgy accounting practices. The EU-Russia and US-China would be of the same broader conflict. Both the US and China are corrupt but at least in a China the politicians are the owners so they can more easily act in their own interest (less agency cost), the US has a competing oligarchy which leads to looting. There is a right-wing CIA cutout Theilverse faction putting together a bit of a coup and I guess once they are in control the plan is to use Anduril, Palantir, and PMCs to end the looting and create a parallel system of governance / military. I don’t know if that’ll be enough to keep US hegemony, but given the options I guess they’ll think they have to try. China is very much incentivized to wait which we are told we should interpret as weakness. I think being able to take the hits and wait for more advantageous circumstance is a sign of strength. We’re told that the fact that neither Russia, China, or Pakistan will give Iran nuclear weapons is a sign that they are scared, I think that ignores the fact that these conflicts are serving their goal of wearing down the west. If they succeed they might win WWIII without much of a fight.
Sloowms 1y ago
Manufacturing consent has a different meaning. Politicians are always going to argue for their case but that is not the same as how the media and business monopolies in the US have fried the US public on everything. The EU is of course going to start cracking down on imports of goods that do not follow EU law and the platforms that sell these products.
A_D_E_P_T 1y ago
I saw an electronic scooter in a shop here in Slovenia, but the name of the brand was unknown to me, and the price was quite high. (1500 EUR!) I searched the brand on the internet, but nothing turned up. Just Slovenian shops selling that same model at a similar price. [1] This seemed strange to me. So then I screenshot one of those pages and search via image. Turns out that you can buy the exact same scooter on TaoBao for 952 RMB. (~114 EUR.) [2] This is an absolutely ordinary situation. It was much the same when I was purchasing a bike for my kid -- 300 EUR here vs. 250 RMB there, for exactly the same bike. The purchasing power gap between USD|EUR and RMB is immense. (I try not to talk about it too much, because it's the sort of thing that really upsets politicians and local vendors, and they'll want to find a way to make it more painful. It's a secret "life-hack" but for real.) [1] - https://www.telekom.si/e-trgovina/sport-in-prosti-cas/skiroji/p/city-e-cruiser-elektricni-skiro-cobra-2000-crna https://www.telekom.si/e-trgovina/sport-in-prosti-cas/skiroj... [2] - https://item.taobao.com/item.htm?abbucket=5&id=869342176534 https://item.taobao.com/item.htm?abbucket=5&id=869342176534
- ruszki 1y ago
  You know that even inside EU, you won’t get the same thing under the same name with the same parameters in different countries, right? For example, the car which you get in Eastern Europe will have worse components than what you get in Western Europe for the same exact model. This is also true for most of the stuffs which you can get in grocery stores in multiple countries. My guilty pleasure Milka whatever has better ingredients, and the packaging contains more in Western Europe than in Eastern Europe, but the name, and even physical size of the packaging are the same. There are news also about this in Eastern Europe all the time, that groceries, cleaning stuffs, etc are worse there for the same brand and product. But it’s true also with gasoline for example. On paper, you get the same thing in Hungary, and Austria, but at the end your car will go about 10-25% more with the Austrian one, and at the end it costs the same per km, just your car will die sooner from the worse eastern gas. Every public parameter is the same, the reality is completely different.
- throwawaylaptop 1y ago
  A friend of mine scoffed that I would buy a remote controlled 12v relay for $4 from temu. He said I was risking burning my truck to the ground to save $30. He sent me a link to the Amazon one he bought. So I sent him a link to the exact same one, on Temu, for $5.
concinds 1y ago
If popular goods disobey safety regulations, it was bound to catch authorities' attention at some point. But: > they're just a middleman charging an unreasonable fee for importing Chinese-made products Doesn't most of our economy feel like a scam? It seems inevitable, when dominant economic frameworks treat consumption as something which must be endlessly stimulated (at ever-increasing prices), instead of stimulating production, forcing cutthroat competition in areas where there is currently little, and letting the unprofitable rent-seekers and parasites get flushed out.
- cjbgkagh 1y ago
  > Doesn't most of our economy feel like a scam? Yeah, it’s an institutionalized scam that’s increasingly dysfunctional and absurd. It’s only cutthroat capitalism for the less well off majority that make up an increasingly small part of the economy. By dollar value the economy is dominated by financialization and speculative asset bubbles.
TazeTSchnitzel 1y ago
This feels like a necessary evil when it is often cheaper to buy an entire Chinese product directly with free shipping than to pay for just the domestic shipping of anything at all. This is a market distortion which has a huge cost to the environment among other things. On the other hand China is the manufacturing giant of the world, and being able to source components directly in small quantities at a reasonable price is probably very useful to small businesses, so I hope that can continue somehow.
tgsovlerkhgsel 1y ago
Also, there is a limit. If buying locally means the product costs 10x as much and the shipping is another $15 on top, don't be surprised if I choose the option that doesn't cost me an arm and a leg, and don't expect me to vote for anyone who tries to make me pay 20x as much.
- jabjq 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - esperent 1y ago
    Thank you for the info, random new account that pops up on every single thread about the EU to make comments about how terrible the EU is.
- 9dev 1y ago
  You’ll pay the price eventually. China can sweep the European market with products, underbidding every EU company. If they did that with no backlash, we’d see the local economy plunge, followed by wages, buying power, standard of living, and so on. We need to fend this off, even if it means people will have to pay more for individual purchases, because the larger population does not understand macroscopic effects. China is a danger to the EU, and also the US (even though the US currently is mostly dangerous to itself).
  - tgsovlerkhgsel 1y ago
    For the cases I'm talking about, my choices are buying from China or literally cutting my buying power by a factor of 10-20 not hypothetically maybe in the future but right now. I can set myself on fire trying to keep Europe warm... or I can not.
  - kelipso 1y ago
    EU should learn to compete instead of reselling overpriced products at huge markups.
troupo 1y ago
> I gladly buy from local EU businesses, but not if they're just a middleman charging an unreasonable fee for importing Chinese-made products. I bought LED string lights from a local company (Clas Ohlson in Sweden), and very similar looking lights from Temu. Clas Ohlson: wires isolated from each other and running perfectly parallel to each other through the entire string. A nice power converter. Lights all identical, properly secured. Made in China. Temu: wires nearly touching each other in multiple places. No power converter, you plug the thing directly into the power socket. Lights embedded every which way. Made in China. Quite often those "unreasonable fees" are for quality control
csomar 1y ago
It always worked like that except this time they had to do it on a short notice. Kinda hard to keep discrete.
thrance 1y ago
China's been antagonized by every political forces in the West for as long as I can remember, this has nothing to do with "manufacturing consent". By now, it should be obvious that the European Union, the organization whose sole purpose is pushing the neoliberal agenda, has absolutely no will to restrict free trade with anyone.
- 9dev 1y ago
  The EU has no sole purpose, but the most important one is harmonising the inner-European market. It did so by introducing Schengen roaming, for example, which allows me to relocate into any other EU country right now, buy a house and found a company, without any restrictions or visa necessary. I can buy goods from anywhere in the EU without tariffs or clearing. I enjoy natural parks and arts, all funded by the EU. If I go on vacation in one of the newer, poorer EU countries, I don’t drive through slums, because they received subsidies by the other members to raise their standard of living. I could go on for a while, but my point is: the EU has brought a lot of positive change and it’s certainly not just pushing a neoliberal agenda. Even if you ignore all of this, how do you think the individual member states would fare if they had to compete against the lunatic in the White House or China alone? If we didn’t band together, we’d be completely impotent against the bigger world powers.
  - thrance 1y ago
    To be fair, neoliberalism was imprecise. I believe the correct term is ordoliberalism[1]. Still, the EU has little interest in matters of sovereignty. I am simply trying to explain the otherwise baffling leniency toward very hostile actors like (current) America or China: because this goes directly against its core values, one of them being to always promote free trade. This is even stated as one of its "aim and value" in [2]. I am no Eurosceptic, I think we should just acknowledge and challenge the EU's current limitations if we want to move forward. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordoliberalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordoliberalism [2] https://european-union.europa.eu/principles-countries-history/principles-and-values/aims-and-values_en https://european-union.europa.eu/principles-countries-histor...
ikekkdcjkfke 1y ago
The ENTIRE EU economy would collapse if the middlemen were cut out
the-anarchist 1y ago
> plans to make it very difficult for European consumers to order from China directly. This has been the case for over a decade now. As a consumer, ordering directly from a Chinese seller/manufacturer was always met with intense scrutiny and taxation the moment consumers would have to pick up their package at customs. It has been made economically unreasonable for the average person to do these kind of things, which is why ... > they're just a middleman charging an unreasonable fee for importing Chinese-made products This has become a notorious trend within the EU. Unlike in the US, where consumers could order directly from Chinese vendors without being taxed, the EU implemented policies that only benefitted the cheeky business (wo)men who wanted to make a quick buck by playing middleman. In my opinion, this pseudo-protectionist behavior by EU lawmakers was a key reason for Amazon's uprising in Europe. Amazon offered the cheap Chinese products the population wanted, yet undercut local middlemen at large.

by sva_ 1y ago

seec 1y ago

The sad truth is that the majority of common products are like this and the markup is for covering the insane amount of bullshit job to run the bureaucracy enabling this. Which is exactly why they are trying to close the "loophole", if the poor people can go directly to the source, big government can't put its hand in every single process to tax it in order to pay for all the bullshit. The industry is complicit because they get to make more profit this way, the whole system is corrupted anyway. As for the things that are made in the EU, they are barely affordable for the middle class already, precisely because there is very little value creation and it's get taxed to the ground. The ones suffering the most are the poor, who are often the ones actually working to create said value, preventing access to those cheap goods is just another way to force them to stay poor.

seydor 1y ago

i d be surprised if this wasn't some "influence" coming from the US administration for my part i am ordering lots of trinkets that i might need, assuming that Temu will be banned soon

userbinator 1y ago
The EU and US have historically been very much opposites, and now increasingly more so, when it comes to things like this.
- cjbgkagh 1y ago
  The US is gearing up for a China conflict, there is a split between the prep for war with China now or sort out Iran first and then prep for war with China. It’s currently most obvious in the MAGA split but the dems are captured as well. AOC is signaling she’ll play ball in what I assume is prep for a presidential run. Like most voters I’m anti-war but people tend not to get what they vote for in important matters like that. The US will not permit the EU to sit on the sidelines.
  - TheOtherHobbes 1y ago
    By 2027, the EU will be too busy fighting Russia to help much with China. Meanwhile the US has far too little independent industrial manufacturing left. All of its super-expensive weapons systems need components and raw materials - especially rare earths - imported from China. The US has a huge stockpile of weapons which are incredibly vulnerable to sneak drone attacks. It has neither the talent, the resources, nor the industrial capacity to build replacements quickly at scale, never mind mass produce the drone swarm armies that will win the next war. I'm not a huge fan of empires, but I wouldn't be at all surprised to see China become the sole remaining superpower within ten years - before starting its own inevitable decay into corruption and psychopathy.
    - redeeman 1y ago
      > By 2027, the EU will be too busy fighting Russia to help much with China. you think the EU will declare war with russia? they will not do it formally, but who knows if they will send troops. you think russia will invade attempt to EU? if so, you're delusional
    - cjbgkagh 1y ago
      I try to explain to people the absolute absurd state of affairs that refined high quality goods are often cheaper from China than it is to import the raw materials. Our financialized economy is dependent on cheep Chinese goods and dodgy accounting practices. The EU-Russia and US-China would be of the same broader conflict. Both the US and China are corrupt but at least in a China the politicians are the owners so they can more easily act in their own interest (less agency cost), the US has a competing oligarchy which leads to looting. There is a right-wing CIA cutout Theilverse faction putting together a bit of a coup and I guess once they are in control the plan is to use Anduril, Palantir, and PMCs to end the looting and create a parallel system of governance / military. I don’t know if that’ll be enough to keep US hegemony, but given the options I guess they’ll think they have to try. China is very much incentivized to wait which we are told we should interpret as weakness. I think being able to take the hits and wait for more advantageous circumstance is a sign of strength. We’re told that the fact that neither Russia, China, or Pakistan will give Iran nuclear weapons is a sign that they are scared, I think that ignores the fact that these conflicts are serving their goal of wearing down the west. If they succeed they might win WWIII without much of a fight.

Sloowms 1y ago

Manufacturing consent has a different meaning. Politicians are always going to argue for their case but that is not the same as how the media and business monopolies in the US have fried the US public on everything. The EU is of course going to start cracking down on imports of goods that do not follow EU law and the platforms that sell these products.

A_D_E_P_T 1y ago

I saw an electronic scooter in a shop here in Slovenia, but the name of the brand was unknown to me, and the price was quite high. (1500 EUR!) I searched the brand on the internet, but nothing turned up. Just Slovenian shops selling that same model at a similar price. [1] This seemed strange to me. So then I screenshot one of those pages and search via image. Turns out that you can buy the exact same scooter on TaoBao for 952 RMB. (~114 EUR.) [2] This is an absolutely ordinary situation. It was much the same when I was purchasing a bike for my kid -- 300 EUR here vs. 250 RMB there, for exactly the same bike. The purchasing power gap between USD|EUR and RMB is immense. (I try not to talk about it too much, because it's the sort of thing that really upsets politicians and local vendors, and they'll want to find a way to make it more painful. It's a secret "life-hack" but for real.) [1] - https://www.telekom.si/e-trgovina/sport-in-prosti-cas/skiroji/p/city-e-cruiser-elektricni-skiro-cobra-2000-crna https://www.telekom.si/e-trgovina/sport-in-prosti-cas/skiroj... [2] - https://item.taobao.com/item.htm?abbucket=5&id=869342176534 https://item.taobao.com/item.htm?abbucket=5&id=869342176534

ruszki 1y ago
You know that even inside EU, you won’t get the same thing under the same name with the same parameters in different countries, right? For example, the car which you get in Eastern Europe will have worse components than what you get in Western Europe for the same exact model. This is also true for most of the stuffs which you can get in grocery stores in multiple countries. My guilty pleasure Milka whatever has better ingredients, and the packaging contains more in Western Europe than in Eastern Europe, but the name, and even physical size of the packaging are the same. There are news also about this in Eastern Europe all the time, that groceries, cleaning stuffs, etc are worse there for the same brand and product. But it’s true also with gasoline for example. On paper, you get the same thing in Hungary, and Austria, but at the end your car will go about 10-25% more with the Austrian one, and at the end it costs the same per km, just your car will die sooner from the worse eastern gas. Every public parameter is the same, the reality is completely different.
throwawaylaptop 1y ago
A friend of mine scoffed that I would buy a remote controlled 12v relay for $4 from temu. He said I was risking burning my truck to the ground to save $30. He sent me a link to the Amazon one he bought. So I sent him a link to the exact same one, on Temu, for $5.

concinds 1y ago

If popular goods disobey safety regulations, it was bound to catch authorities' attention at some point. But: > they're just a middleman charging an unreasonable fee for importing Chinese-made products Doesn't most of our economy feel like a scam? It seems inevitable, when dominant economic frameworks treat consumption as something which must be endlessly stimulated (at ever-increasing prices), instead of stimulating production, forcing cutthroat competition in areas where there is currently little, and letting the unprofitable rent-seekers and parasites get flushed out.

cjbgkagh 1y ago
> Doesn't most of our economy feel like a scam? Yeah, it’s an institutionalized scam that’s increasingly dysfunctional and absurd. It’s only cutthroat capitalism for the less well off majority that make up an increasingly small part of the economy. By dollar value the economy is dominated by financialization and speculative asset bubbles.

TazeTSchnitzel 1y ago

This feels like a necessary evil when it is often cheaper to buy an entire Chinese product directly with free shipping than to pay for just the domestic shipping of anything at all. This is a market distortion which has a huge cost to the environment among other things. On the other hand China is the manufacturing giant of the world, and being able to source components directly in small quantities at a reasonable price is probably very useful to small businesses, so I hope that can continue somehow.

tgsovlerkhgsel 1y ago

Also, there is a limit. If buying locally means the product costs 10x as much and the shipping is another $15 on top, don't be surprised if I choose the option that doesn't cost me an arm and a leg, and don't expect me to vote for anyone who tries to make me pay 20x as much.

jabjq 1y ago
[flagged]
- esperent 1y ago
  Thank you for the info, random new account that pops up on every single thread about the EU to make comments about how terrible the EU is.
9dev 1y ago
You’ll pay the price eventually. China can sweep the European market with products, underbidding every EU company. If they did that with no backlash, we’d see the local economy plunge, followed by wages, buying power, standard of living, and so on. We need to fend this off, even if it means people will have to pay more for individual purchases, because the larger population does not understand macroscopic effects. China is a danger to the EU, and also the US (even though the US currently is mostly dangerous to itself).
- tgsovlerkhgsel 1y ago
  For the cases I'm talking about, my choices are buying from China or literally cutting my buying power by a factor of 10-20 not hypothetically maybe in the future but right now. I can set myself on fire trying to keep Europe warm... or I can not.
- kelipso 1y ago
  EU should learn to compete instead of reselling overpriced products at huge markups.

troupo 1y ago

> I gladly buy from local EU businesses, but not if they're just a middleman charging an unreasonable fee for importing Chinese-made products. I bought LED string lights from a local company (Clas Ohlson in Sweden), and very similar looking lights from Temu. Clas Ohlson: wires isolated from each other and running perfectly parallel to each other through the entire string. A nice power converter. Lights all identical, properly secured. Made in China. Temu: wires nearly touching each other in multiple places. No power converter, you plug the thing directly into the power socket. Lights embedded every which way. Made in China. Quite often those "unreasonable fees" are for quality control

csomar 1y ago

It always worked like that except this time they had to do it on a short notice. Kinda hard to keep discrete.

thrance 1y ago

China's been antagonized by every political forces in the West for as long as I can remember, this has nothing to do with "manufacturing consent". By now, it should be obvious that the European Union, the organization whose sole purpose is pushing the neoliberal agenda, has absolutely no will to restrict free trade with anyone.

9dev 1y ago
The EU has no sole purpose, but the most important one is harmonising the inner-European market. It did so by introducing Schengen roaming, for example, which allows me to relocate into any other EU country right now, buy a house and found a company, without any restrictions or visa necessary. I can buy goods from anywhere in the EU without tariffs or clearing. I enjoy natural parks and arts, all funded by the EU. If I go on vacation in one of the newer, poorer EU countries, I don’t drive through slums, because they received subsidies by the other members to raise their standard of living. I could go on for a while, but my point is: the EU has brought a lot of positive change and it’s certainly not just pushing a neoliberal agenda. Even if you ignore all of this, how do you think the individual member states would fare if they had to compete against the lunatic in the White House or China alone? If we didn’t band together, we’d be completely impotent against the bigger world powers.
- thrance 1y ago
  To be fair, neoliberalism was imprecise. I believe the correct term is ordoliberalism[1]. Still, the EU has little interest in matters of sovereignty. I am simply trying to explain the otherwise baffling leniency toward very hostile actors like (current) America or China: because this goes directly against its core values, one of them being to always promote free trade. This is even stated as one of its "aim and value" in [2]. I am no Eurosceptic, I think we should just acknowledge and challenge the EU's current limitations if we want to move forward. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordoliberalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordoliberalism [2] https://european-union.europa.eu/principles-countries-history/principles-and-values/aims-and-values_en https://european-union.europa.eu/principles-countries-histor...

ikekkdcjkfke 1y ago

The ENTIRE EU economy would collapse if the middlemen were cut out

the-anarchist 1y ago

> plans to make it very difficult for European consumers to order from China directly. This has been the case for over a decade now. As a consumer, ordering directly from a Chinese seller/manufacturer was always met with intense scrutiny and taxation the moment consumers would have to pick up their package at customs. It has been made economically unreasonable for the average person to do these kind of things, which is why ... > they're just a middleman charging an unreasonable fee for importing Chinese-made products This has become a notorious trend within the EU. Unlike in the US, where consumers could order directly from Chinese vendors without being taxed, the EU implemented policies that only benefitted the cheeky business (wo)men who wanted to make a quick buck by playing middleman. In my opinion, this pseudo-protectionist behavior by EU lawmakers was a key reason for Amazon's uprising in Europe. Amazon offered the cheap Chinese products the population wanted, yet undercut local middlemen at large.