Comment by ian_holt | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ian_holt | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

<The memory makers can't just sell to only AI companies forever, if they do Chinese manufacturers will move in and eventually eat them from below (as has happened many times before)>

Unfortunately this has been happening almost forever. You can spend 10s of thousands of $$ design, prototyping, building & marketing anything, whether a physical product or software & some company where the wages are lower are going to come along, build it cheaper (not necessarily better quality either) and ship it to the world.

As a result, the other countries import more stuff "because it is cheaper" and eventually local manufacturing dwindles away to virtually nothing. That is the case here in Australia. Our manufacturing base has shrunk to stuff all compared to what we had 30 years ago & as a result we are poorer as a nation for it

>Unfortunately this has been happening almost forever. You can spend 10s of thousands of $$ design, prototyping, building & marketing anything, whether a physical product or software & some company where the wages are lower are going to come along, build it cheaper (not necessarily better quality either) and ship it to the world.

>As a result, the other countries import more stuff "because it is cheaper" and eventually local manufacturing dwindles away to virtually nothing. That is the case here in Australia. Our manufacturing base has shrunk to stuff all compared to what we had 30 years ago & as a result we are poorer as a nation for it

Then the companies in that country need to learn how to be more competitive and governments need to learn how not to overregulate, overtax and raise barriers.

> overregulate, overtax and raise barriers

Also known as labor and environmental protections. I am in favor of labor and environmental protections, but when producers are allowed to avoid them simply by moving production abroad, well, the incentives are clear.

> some company where the wages are lower are going to come along, build it cheaper (not necessarily better quality either) and ship it to the world.

Yeah, it's called competition. It existed even in the socialist countries (where is was called "socialist competition/emulation").

Reply on news.ycombinator.com