Hacker News Reader

Comment by pfannkuchen | Hacker News Reader

Just stop trading manufactured products with Asia.

Their people are still transitioning from agrarian hardship to urban factory life, and there seems to be a zeal that comes with this transition, a willingness to work hard for what here today would be considered little.

Good for them. But in Europe we had this transition already and we became disillusioned with the lifestyle tradeoffs.

Having our people do nothing productive while all of our life objects are made by others is not sustainable and it is awful for the morale of our peoples. It needs to be stopped.

View on HN

>Their people are still transitioning from agrarian hardship to urban factory life, and there seems to be a zeal that comes with this transition, a willingness to work hard for what here today would be considered little.

You don't find hordes of Chinese peasants in their dark factories.

Do you think that JLCPCB offer such prices because they have 2000000 lowly paid machinists drilling the pcb holes manually? China invests in all kinds of automation like crazy

Yes! China invests heavily in the future. Automation, technology, better processes, you name it.

This is exactly what Cherry did NOT do. Now we see the end results.

Yeah what percent of factories are fully automated? Last I heard it wasn’t robots jumping off the roof in Shenzhen.

Is the transportation fully automated? Are the mines to get the materials automated?

There is huge difference indeed in transportation industry - China works their chineese drivers to the bone 18 hours a day, whereas Germany works eastern european drivers to the bone 18 hours a day.

While China is hardly a happy place and exploitation is rampant - there is less on the assembly floor - not because they care, but because even cheaper than exploiting people is not having to hire people at all. China installed in 2024 more industrial robots than the rest of the world combined and they seems to lead the innovation in home robots too.

We are at a fun point in history - for the first time the ability to automate seems to really outstrip the ability to create new jobs.

Of course they installed more industrial robots than the rest of the world combined, most of the high volume factories are there.

I have nothing against the Chinese by the way, I just don’t think the fate of Europe should be so beholden to whatever they are doing with manufacturing. They are undercutting us in a way that hurts Europeans? Great, cut them off. Most Chinese products in the west are lower quality than what they replaced anyway.

The real answer is that the long period of Chinese outsourcing masked the inflationary impact of money supply expansion, which is super duper convenient for the people with power in the west. So this won’t happen absent some kind of revolution, or a recognition that the juice has been squeezed too much.

> It needs to be stopped.

forcing germans to buy everything at 10 times of what it costs now is not the way to rescue the country

Can you please think through what would happen a bit further? What you say here is a first order analysis on a very short time scale. It does not capture the end state of such a change. The acceptable transition period for a change depends on the severity of the problem the change is targeting, and in this case here the problem is quite severe, so our acceptable transition period should at least be measured in half decades, not weeks.

How is Apple not a forbidden product after this wall comes down?

Perhaps you can limit the allowed manufactured units to India, but the U.S. also wants those.

No, we've been trying it here in Argentina for the last 75 years.

When we started, we were one of the richest countries in the world.

The end state is worse than you can possibly imagine.

It's not the way to rescue the country.

The harsh reality is that the world as it is depends on what amounts to slave labor, and that is priced into (or out of, rather) the goods that are imported. The mental and economic gymnastics involved in justifying it or pretending otherwise are just window dressing.

The reason why Chinese products are successful is that they achieve the best balance between usability and price.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com