It seems like we are very slowly (and far too late) coming to the realisation that outsourcing all your manufacturing eventually outsources your power and control.
This is particularly conspicuous in the case of things like Huawei and 5G, where western countries are desperately pumping money into Scandinavian telcos as they realise, far too late, that getting a competitive foreign country to build your baseline telecommunications infrastructure is fucking insane.
The USA rose to ascendancy on the back of strong domestic manufacturing and has deferred a huge amount of power and influence to China by sending its manufacturing overseas. On top of that, multiple generations of comfortable, first world Westerners don't have the same sort of hunger and drive for success that is pushing incredible advances in the East.
What can you do about this? Do you just try to manufacture high-end products domestically? Do you try to outperform Chinese manufacturing with automation in the place of cheap labour, but if that's the case how does the West even catch up, when we're already lagging and falling further behind when it comes to manufacturing processes?
I see a tremendous amount of "We will stay at the top just because" sentiment that comes from decades of Western success and complacency, and was a hallmark attitude of many empires in their final days.
How do you fix the national security problems that come with offshore manufacturing? How do you compete with a country with 1 billion willing, low paid workers without sacrificing your own labor force's rights? Why isn't this discussed more?
Western Manufacturing
Idk lol
Stop taxing wages
Put up trade tariffs instead
>Inb4 cool it with the antisemitism
No
Something along the lines of overthrowing their government and redirecting all that cheap labor into the coffers of your own megacorps.
This
Huawei doesn't make their own components user, the west makes them and sells them to Huawei, and then Huawei has been trying to sell them back to the west at a markup. In fact, basically none of China's manufacturing sector is self-sufficient on any level and even for the things that they are, their shipping industry isn't self-sufficient either.
But American manufacturing would take decades to get onto China's level, if ever at this point, so you'd just be operating at a disadvantage buying inferior products for higher prices. I don't see how tariffs solve the problem at all.
>But American manufacturing would take decades to get onto China's level, if ever at this point, so you'd just be operating at a disadvantage buying inferior products for higher prices. I don't see how tariffs solve the problem at all.
I think what elon's doing with automated factories is the only move for US in the future
Yeah I think that would be the only way to leapfrog them too. It's the only workaround when they have such a labor advantage.
But then what do the citizenry actually do when manufacturing supply chain is fully automated? I suppose that's a separate issue.
That doesn't help the labor population, it fact it drives the domestic gap further.
Hey, retard. Huawei is repackaging Western components. America with 40 years of offshoring efforts is still a larger manufacturer than China with 40 years of manufacturing subsidization.
>That doesn't help the labor population, it fact it drives the domestic gap further.
historically, (during the industrial revolution) the average IQ in the US was high. not so high these days. that said, the smart people that do exist in the states will have very well paying jobs. the brainlets will have miserable lives unless we figure out some kind of UBI solution that doesn't completely implode our society
Then why the sudden Huawei fear and the rush to get baseline components from Ericsson/Nokia et al?
Your first problem is that you have no ruler. The reason this isn't discussed is that there's nobody actually at the helm of this to ensure unified action against China, only anarchic bureaucrats that have no stake in the future of their countries but plenty of money to make by dealing with the enemy. This lets China prey upon the world with protectionist policies where there are none against them.
Mercantilism was right all along, modern economics is quackery corrupted by political pressures. You have to leverage your own consumer market to get your industry off the ground. If you take imports more than exports, you bleed power.
Consumers are an asset of their own, one to be leveraged. The only way to solve this is to close markets and throw around weight in international influence to get others to do so while you still have the power. Otherwise no effort is going to get you more efficient manufacturing than a Chinese slave or even Chinese automated factories that can afford to sell for less due to currency manipulation.
Of course, none of this will happen, again, because those calling the shots operate within term limits in which they are only encouraged to pillage.
all on purpose
siphon money and power to the commies
why did it have to be china? why not india or the dozen other countries that could have been easily exploited?
commies. thats why.
Good insight. So do you see any other outcome than the decline of the West and a return to an almost feudalistic wealth disparity?
>anarchic bureaucrats
Lol
If you think of the end of the Soviet Union where corrupt bureaucrats were just looting whatever they could as the power structure fell to pieces, the phrase makes sense.
Because China put spyware in those western components and people the world over thought it was a stupid plan to pay China so it could expand China's surveillance network.
Yeah so splitting hairs about the origin of the components is kind of a red herring to the point i was making about a foreign country having its fingers in your telco infrastructure, isnt it.
Trump for all his faults has changed the game on China. The tiger is stirring once more.
While we have lived in a time when the state has been complacent and absent, it must be remembered that hawks within the state have been waiting for decades to move. Industrial policy, currency weapons, even the more visible 'trade war'. It's all on the table now.
This is not like the British after WW1, the US and its foreign policy elite still has the confidence and energy to fight and counterattack. China got to confidence and moved a decade too early - they will now face the consequence of that hubris.
The greatest danger to this is a Biden presidency but even there, the dial has been shifted permanently that the status quo free trade "thinkers" have been sidelined. Expect the remaining six months of the Trump Presidency to see continuing escalation as the hawks seek to bake in the shift so that there can be no step back.
prospect.org
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
Anyone else think the LED street light and smart meter conversion was a massive transfer of wealth to China?
>expand China's surveillance network.
The US surveillance network was built into most things.
If Millennials do not turn away from leftist policies then the West is doomed for a century. Business will collapse and the world power will hail from Asia but not without Asian wars. Japan, Koreas, Vietnam, Philipenes, Hong Kong, India and China will 100% go to war with one another when America is no longer able or willing to exert military pressure on the region. When either inability or willingness on America occurs, invest in the defense industry.
No, because Huawei can't actually continue putting its fingers into western telecom infrastructure without explicit western - actually explicit American - permission.
And the US paid for it. China wants to charge people to expand its network.
>It seems like we are very slowly (and far too late) coming to the realisation that outsourcing all your manufacturing eventually outsources your power and control
No, the globalists knew exactly what they were doing.
This thread belongs on Zig Forums. Bye.
You're saying America is intentioanlly complicit in China spying on them?
No. This is a Roman Empire scenario, political unity bleeding out into nothing over a long period of time and regional elites holding the pieces together into something different.
What's wrong about that? Have you ever heard of the Managerial Revolution?
You have a heap of civil servants with bullshit jobs that are clearly the ones planning and putting out actual policy, but no chain of hierarchy to which they answer, and no one to take responsibility. Hence, anarchic. Why do you think bureaucracies are even inefficient and, well, bureau-forming? It's because there's nobody above to hold them directly accountable to productivity and efficiency.
Take COVID-19. The West has consistently catastrophically failed to produce timely decisions in this regard. What is the hierarchy one can follow to place the blame here? There is none. You can point to political figures, but they just sign off on policy that is fundamentally settled elsewhere - academia, media, NGOs, etc.
Bureaucratic, anarchic institutions where nobody makes decisions because nobody has to take responsibility if a necessary decision is not taken but everyone will be blamed for going alone with an idea that turns out to be wrong.
How is a thread about manufacturing not related to business and finance?
Bureaucracy is the opposite of anarchy
A corrupt crony is not the same as an anarchist
I guess you could use offical might with an anarchist mindset but an anarchist would hate to work as bureaucrat in the first place because hed have to follow too many rules and basically act like a robot - at least when his boss is watching
i think it's a stupid semantic point to stick on when it was perfectly clear what he was saying
They were for a long time, because Washington has been distracted for 30 years, or maybe uncharitably some people have been getting kickbacks from the CCP to enable