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Comment by UI_at_80x24 | Hacker News Reader

>Sadly, it's all about price.

This is the problem, but not how you are stating it. If CEO's didn't make 300x the lowest paid employee, and "shareholders didn't demand" exponential growth quarter after quarter, then the price to be 'Not made in China' would be reasonable.

Fix these problems then the damages caused by seeking "cheapest possible AND cheaper" would be non-existant.

*NB: I am a shareholder. I want my investment to MATCH inflation not magically exceed it. If everybody stops being so greedy this is possible. (I wouldn't need to buy shares if my company and government didn't fuck up Retirement Benefits.)

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I think it's more complex than that. It's not _just_ the CEO and investors greed. People's time in "1st world countries" is more expensive because _everything_ is more expensive. There's pretty much no manufacturing left here in Australia, because the wages on offer for "factory jobs" can't pay rent or buy food in Sydney/Melbourne/Brisbane. And if you _did_ pay your "factory workers" in Australian cities enough to rent/buy a home there, your base assembly costs start out at more that the manufactured-and-delivered price for the same item from China. Automation will help fix one end of that problem (the cost to manufacure side), but will make the other end worse (even fewer jobs for lesser skilled workers).

I don't _like_ that fact that global economies and inexpensive shipping have made arbitrage of inequity a real business profit driver. But the reality is that a bunch of people in China are prepared to work in factories making widgets for less money than anybody in Australia - and moving shipping containers full of widgets is _way_ less expensive than the difference.

>If everybody stops being so greedy this is possible.

Problem is that we, as evolved creatures in a world of scarcity, are hoarders by... nature. Greed is just a morally misguided way of hoarding. So, waiting for people to stop being greedy is much more difficult than just making the right moral choices.

And it's not _just_ greed.

Is a person struggling to make rent in New York or San Francisco or Sydney being "greedy" when they demand more pay than workers with equivalent skills in rural China or Vietnam or Bangladesh or Rawanda?

Global economies mean that while some things stay rooted in local pricing (like the food and shelter at the top of Maslow's hierarchy), while other things can be _way_ more valuable if you stuff them in a shipping container and send them to the docks of Oakland or New Jersey...

If I can house and feed my family for $US10/month in Rawanda, and my neighbours can only afford to pay me 30c for my widgets, but they can sell for $100 in San Francisco, of _course_ I'll jam 100,000 of them into a container and pay $5,000 to send them there...

That'll keep working great for the Rwandan guy - up until his kids decide they want iPhones and cars and university degrees, and the costs of their expectations increase until they cannot afford a manufacturing-based economy to fund them either...

BS, if it wasn’t about consumers going for lower prices, the market would be packed with high-end manufacturers. People want cheap shit at Walmart regardless of how much the CEO of Alphabet makes.

If you have an investment that matches inflation then after taxes you will have a negative return.

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