Hacker News Reader

Comment by bigmattystyles | Hacker News Reader

To be fair, everything is Chinese made. I would be even the Apple TV and NVIDIA Shield are made in China and if a state actor is determined to get a malicious payload in....

View on HN

To play devil's advocate, when someone says "Chinese made" they're usually well aware of your point, and are more using it as a common way to describe product mills spitting out countless devices with dubious quality or configuration.

Of course theres good products made in China, and plenty of entirely Chinese brands killing it doing their thing.

its pretty straight racism though.

its US software companies that are the worst of the worst in terms of adware and malware being shipped under monopoly control

Its based on the most common heuristic people have developed in regards to the phenomenon. What do you think about 'alphabet soup company' instead, referring to the tendency for names to be a mix of random letters? Otherwise, you can try and create a better term for 'unaccountable third parties using US platforms to dodge liability for their product made out of the cheapest components and software possible' and see if that catches on.

Yes it is also the US companies that are a problem but these are two separate problems and need different terms.

There's enough evil malware provider blame to go around.

It's not racism at all to be weary of (any) political system, its overreach and the incentives of the people living in it, be it China or America or Russia.

The word racism is vastly overused these days.

> its pretty straight racism though.

It's not. Firstly, because countries aren't races. Second, because it's just a leftover from a time where that was a good heuristic.

Made in China and random Chinese brands are two very different things

Often they're exactly the same things

Often the USA brand is just buying the random Chinese design from the same factory that brands it in random letters, and tripling the price.

if you think the Apple TV or Nvidia shield example applies to this then I don't know what to say

> To be fair, everything is Chinese made

Yes. Chinese manufacturing is quite a phenomenon, useful and everywhere

But to be completely fair, a $40 video projector has a warning label. The price

You can put a bigger price tag over it. It won't be any better.

This isn't about state actors though. There's a world of difference between a name brand (possibly even a Chinese one) versus what I would term "chineseum". It's nothing to do with China per se and everything to do with purchasing from the extreme low end of the market. It just so happens that the vast majority of that segment is manufactured in China at present.

I think normally when people say Chinese made in this way, what they're really communicating is that there's no (meaningful) brand. All they know about it is that it is from China.

My Samsung phone is made in Vietnam.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com