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I would like to depend on China in the same way I would like to depend on the US. We live in a global world and it has the advantage that we can get best e-scooter from China, the best operating system from the US and the best car from Germany. It is really a boon for everyone.

It's a difficult problem to tackle for sure. The easy solution (at least, if you allow yourself to simply ignore the consequences of doing so :) would be to just increase import duties so that retail prices match with locally produced products, but I guess that's quite incompatible with the idea of a free market. It also won't make you a popular global player.

Still, as a thought experiment, I wonder how it would work out for the global economy if every country/economic block in the world would simply match prices of imported products with comparable locally produced items. I guess one of the big issues would be how to assure comparisons between products are fair.

I'd be willing to pay twice as much. The issue with this scooter is not the price though but the price-to-quality(specs) ratio. I would not want this one for free and they are asking some 2k!

Also "It is absolutely impossible to turn your Äike on and ride without turning it on through your personal account on our app." This is a no-go. No way! It is like one of those "security measures" which complicates lives of users without adding much if any to security.

> Unfortunately, the only way to combat this is by restricting the free market and becoming more insular - like Trump and his administration tried to do with raising more taxes on stuff from China.

There is another way than taxes: impose (or, where they exist, drastically increase) minimum standards upon products and manufacturing practices, similar to how we have existing laws about e.g. animal care, and actually enforce them both inside the market (to prevent locals from short-cutting, e.g. by using undocumented immigrants as farm labor) and outside the market (to combat stuff like outright slavery).

> Factory farming is bad, animals are bred to grow chomnk within weeks and it's atrocious, but this organic meat is twice as expensive for the same product, so ????

For food especially, there is another problem - minimum wages are way too low and rents too high, both in the US and EU. Way too many people have to "choose" low-quality or exploitatively-made food simply because they already are struggling to make ends meet.

And of course people are going to get annoyed at politics if they can see rising food prices, which means (together with legal bribery aka "donations" from Big Ag) politicians don't like to impose or tighten standards in agriculture.

Fix minimum wages and people will automatically go for healthier food.

> Fix minimum wages and people will automatically go for healthier food.

Or a blingier car. Never underestimate the bling factor of an object everyone sees you in ;)

Anyway, most countries have import taxes (customs tax + VAT in Serbia is paid on both shipping cost and item cost), so while some items are still cheaper to get abroad, getting a 33.90GBP raspberry pi for me would add 12 GBP for shipping, and then 30% of 45.90GBP, or another 13 GBP for a total of 59 GBP: not so cheap anymore.

Items from China are similar, and with COVID, shipping charges are frequently bigger than the item cost itself (you get a small $10 item, with a total coming out to like $31).

But I'd definitely like to see a move towards higher standards of production, but they are hard to standardize across the world.