I suspect that as you approach being entirely dependent on on supplier it goes from being a nice lever for each side to being a noose for one. China doesn't want to lose Apple's business. Apple can't lose China. Extrapolate across many industries.
There's a difference between having a partner and being entirely dependent.
There's a scifi book series where a stable government is maintained by exclusive monopolies that the other provenience are dependent upon. Any provenience trying to break away will quickly find they are in an economic collapse because they can't supply themselves.
Fascinating idea, until the monopolies break everything. I'll see if I can't find it.
"Based on the Schuman plan, six countries sign a treaty to run their coal and steel industries under a common management. In this way, no single country can make the weapons of war to turn against others, as in the past."
This was how Stalin structured the Soviet economy during his industrialization push. It was one of the major reasons the collapse of the soviet union was so economically disastrous for the newly independent states.
Yes, you need cells with central dna and even superorganisms with some shared, some not shared dna, but with the undersatnding that diversity and competition at the higher levels is needed for longer-term continuance of the system as a whole.
A kid spending her pocket money at the candy shop is a form of central planning. Neither are central planning as the term is used when talking about economic systems though.
The objection to communism isn't that people plan things. It's that the planners face no competition and the results of their plans are inescapable.
Well, guess what happened when Sears implemented an internal free market system:
> Major innovation needs collaboration, not competition. For innovation, internal markets have the same problem as hierarchical bureaucracies. Managers vote their resources for innovations that bolster their current fiefdoms and careers. The safest strategy is to stick to the status quo. Ms. Kimes’ article gives multiple examples where competing managers at Sears looked after their own units at the expense of the interests of the firm as a whole.
> Now, what was that you were saying about central planning?
I was saying that central planning that has no competition and everybody is forced to follow is the usual complaint about central planning, which has nothing to do with people and groups privately choosing to plan and collaborate.
Well, I just showed that forcing people to compete while not having a plan to "escape" stifles innovation. So, there's your sequitor.
In the future, I would really prefer that you either save the snark, assume good faith, and at least try to keep up with the points being made, or just keep it all to yourself and don't reply to me, alright? I will gladly do you the same courtesy. Breaking things down into teeny tiny pieces grows tiresome quickly.
> Well, I just showed that forcing people to compete while not having a plan to "escape" stifles innovation.
That doesn't relate to what I wrote, which is why it is a non sequitur. Rather than just say "what about 'blah'", try actually addressing my comment coherently.
And you didn't show such a thing anyway. People aren't forced to compete, as can be seen even in the example you gave, not to mention all the collectives, unions, partnerships, companies, groups, corporations, etc., around us.
> In the future, I would really prefer that you either save the snark, assume good faith, and at least try to keep up with the points being made, or just keep it all to yourself and don't reply to me, alright? I will gladly do you the same courtesy. Breaking things down into teeny tiny pieces grows tiresome quickly.
Please.
"Now, what was that you were saying about central planning?"
That is the height of rude and bad-faith snark after posting something that did not even attempt to address my comment which was criticism of communist central planning, and I said nothing about forced competition or that people should be prevented from cooperating, so you can dismount your high horse.
Since you are obviously having trouble comprehending what I've written, I'll break it down real simply for you: leave me the hell alone or I'm going to contact the admins about your harassment. Is that clear enough?
I'm comprehending what you've written, I just think it's nonsense and hypocrisy.
I've also not initiated any discussion with you that you didn't start, so if you don't like reading my responses then you can take your own advice on that one too. Please do contact the admins if you find yourself unable to cope with that.
This is essentially the US. For all the talk of secession from different factions depending on political winds, not much would really change aside from everything being a little more difficult. All the trade each state depends on that happens now through the nature of our federal system would happen through treaties, just like the UK post-Brexit.
> All the trade each state depends on that happens now through the nature of our federal system would happen through treaties, just like the UK post-Brexit
That’s an argument in favor of secession! They could still trade, but wouldn’t be forced into a single polity making decisions on domestic issues like education, healthcare, abortion, immigration, etc.
So? The projects are already built and the water comes from within the state, for Northern California and most of the agriculture. Only the cities of Southern California rely on water from other states.
Please renounce your moderatorship since you are obviously unable to correctly deduce what is a real argument and what is designed to cause flame wars.
I have no idea why people here fawn over your moderating. Please spare this website of anymore of it.
You’re very mistaken about what kind of hippies PNW folks are if you think they’ll happily give their water to Californians. They’re hippies, but surly ones with guns who don’t look kindly on capitalists who adopt liberalism as an affect. My wife, whose family were among the first settlers in Oregon, gets mad seeing Tillamook cheese in stores here in Maryland. (“That’s our cheese. Fuck you.”)
I think this gets closer to the point I tried to make. There is no unified "blue" or "red," so there wouldn't be a split along the colors cable news paints on election maps. Our FPTP system papers over a lot of diversity of thought that gets wrapped up under the big tents, but doesn't match geography. There are tankies in conservative-run states and evangelicals in Blue Country. Any attempt to split the country along ideological lines would make the most ridiculous gerrymandered district blush.
I think you're mixing up different things. You're correct that teams "blue" and "red" are actually coalitions of people who believe quite different things. But in part that's because of geographic and cultural commonalities that cut across party lines. Both Oregon Democrats and Oregon Republicans skew libertarian, because the state does. In Georgia, both Democrats and Republicans skew more religious.
A lot of the intractability of our national politics is because geographical and cultural differences are overlaid on top of normal political differences. Splitting the country up along geographic lines would allow us to just fight over politics, instead of over deep-rooted cultural patterns.
That's an easier position to take if you aren't one of the people who'd suffer worse religious persecution in a state unconstrained by the constitution. I would still be fighting against those deep-rooted cultural patterns, but I would be overrun quickly without support from enforcement of the 1st and 14th Amendments. State equivalents would be quickly discarded.
But that's what their religion says and it is what it is. It would be wrong for someone else to come along and impose their own cultural patterns (such as secularism) for the sake of a minority. That's just imperialism.
you realize most of the area by land in oregon and washington is very very red. and in a secession scenario they have a shitload more guns than the cities.
and even the parts that are less red probably wouldn't want to pipe the water down to cali latifundia. a lot of that area seems very culturally independent so i doubt they'd like being the breadbasket for something like the cali big cities.
and regardless yeah y'all do because population along the coast is very dense. you don't have enough space there to grow all that food for especially the big cali cities.
they are also way too small to grow enough food for colossal cali cities. and most of that agricultural land east of the coast is very red. look how many people in east oregon want to deadass secede to idaho because they're so sick of portland's bullshit.
Review some electoral maps. The OP was referring to secessionary scenarios, in which case most of Inland California, including the San Joaquin Valley, belongs to Team Red.
Even so, produce does not comprise a material percentage of the US caloric intake. Grains, tubers, grain oils, and meat definitely do.
Beyond food, there's mining and energy. Without the coasts, The US would be significantly inconvenienced. Without flyover country, the US would be dead.
American agriculture is entirely dependent on petroleum, of which the US imports millions of barrels a day.
Inland farmers require foreign oil as an input to the caloric production you describe, which means that to survive they need the ports and pipelines of North America as well as the cooperation of oil-rich nations.
Recently become a net exporter of all petroleum products, with Texas, North Dakota, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Colorado, Alaska and California being the largest producers. At least in the near term I don't think the flyover states are as reliant on imports as the coasts if you were to put them in separate categories.
Pretty sure if there was such a split, gulf coast states and their ports would go with the inland farmers. So petroleum would be imported around the Mississippi.
Likely a split would have the ‘red’ states net exporting petroleum.
Both sides would either devolve into unlivable hellscapes or realize ideological moderation is the only way to run a sustainable government. You can't run a government if it's all "death to red! never mind all the minorities there who've been suppressed" or "death to blue! my kids will hate me and leave at the first opportunity, but I won't care until it's too late."
This is why I said all the current informal federal-based stuff would come back through treaty. I think most people on both "sides" are reasonable, so the split would never actually happen. And if it did, people would quickly miss all the stuff from the other side of it.
It's on a level with considering what happens if the sun disappears. It can't happen without something freakish happening, and none of us really knows how it would go.
Modern farming is completely dependent on those ports you so eagerly gave away. How many millions of people would die of starvation and from the inevitable resource wars while the few people who know how to farm the old-fashioned way figured out how to make it work on land that's been made dependent on abundant imported fertilizer and pesticides?
I do not believe the people yelling "secession!" are prepared to revert to a pre-WWI world.
Modern farming is indeed dependent on imports. But modern-"ish" farming, with tractors, combines, and some degree of mechanization can still be done and maintained without microprocessors, sensors, and precision pumps and machine tools.
And if your supply requirements decrease by 150MM people, that makes the job substantially easier to manage.
> I do not believe the people yelling "secession!" are prepared to revert to a pre-WWI world.
Ah, but they think they are. Which is really the only thing that matters, since beyond a certain point, it's too late.
you are aware the gulf coast has a lot of ports for imports and exports. most gas comes out of "flyover country" and ends up at gulf export sites (see henry hub) and that's the big input to producing ammonia fertilizer.
You guys are really delusional. You think the economic powerhouses (SF, LA, etc) in CA will just let half of CA secede?
California produces almost 14% of all the crops grown in the US. A large portion of that are nuts and high calorie items like avocado and soy. You want food oils? Grains? Meats? CA exports all of those. CA is the 4th biggest producer of cattle in the US, 10th biggest poultry producer. 9th biggest producer of potatoes (Washington is #1, another coastal state). 2nd biggest rice producer.
As far as energy, you realize Texas is also not one of your flyover states, right? And even if it wasn't, we import plenty of energy from pipelines to coastal states so it can be sold or refined. CA has nearly the same refinement capabilities as Texas itself.
Fly over states are land. Undeveloped land is not extrinsically valuable.
is it? most of the agriculturally and industrially productive land is out in flyover country. and depending on who you ask areas that are mostly agriculture qualify as "flyover" even if they're e.g. east oregon/cali/washington. new england is probably the one exception but it's small in terms of area and ag output.
Isn't this comparing, umm, apples and oranges? China doesn't want to lose Apple's business. China can't lose all business relationship with America (or maybe it can, but it will be extremely painful), which is what will likely happen if China invades Taiwan.
You are trying to look at it from a rational person point of view with your own biases, but the other side may think entirely differently. For instance, they may come to a conclusion that they have enough know how to go their own way. Feed some nationalist delusions, discouragement of critical thinking growing over the years and the nation may believe this is actually achievable. Then they may think the attack on Taiwan is just the right thing to do and if "imperialist America" does not like it, they can eat their Apple themselves. Etc.
If anything, such intertwining of economies may actually prevent countries willing to help the attacked side from doing anything apart from token gestures out of fear their supply chains get destroyed. After all why should they care about some island thousands miles away, whereas if they weren't in any way dependent they could have rushed to help.
Well I m in China myself so unlike the person you re replying to, it's not just a bias but my entire life depending on not invading Taiwan. Nobody here or in other cities I know wants to invade Taiwan: people think it's already Chinese anyway, and it's just a political disagreement (ofc in TW they think otherwise and I agree with them to an extent: they re a country but they built all their identity on being "the true China").
Our dependency on the US, but also Japan, India, the EU and to some extent the rest of the world is bound to force us to keep a slow grind rather than blatant violence. At least outside of China.
I know Russia disproved the theory: they were dependent on the EU and fuck it all up anyway but... Russia then proceeded to prove the disaster it is for the country, the people and even the war: you cant win territory easily by murdering blindly left and right your commercial partners and your cultural cousins and unlike what some may believe, even some past expansion had to be based on mutual interest to last.
Before 1949, the Republic of China controlled both mainland China and the island of Taiwan.
After the communist revolution, the government of the RoC retreated to Taiwan. The communists called their government the People's Republic of China.
Both the RoC and the PRC agree that mainland China and the island of Taiwan are "China", and they both agree that one government should be in control. They just disagree on which government that should be.
> Both the RoC and the PRC agree that mainland China and the island of Taiwan are "China", and they both agree that one government should be in control. They just disagree on which government that should be.
That’s not entirely true; the coalition led by the KMT in Taiwan agrees with the PRC on the One China issue, the (currently governing) DPP led coalition does not and views Taiwan as already independent and territorially distinct from the PRC, and does not accept the One China idea.
You are not really disagreeing with the GP. Your reply provides the context behind which parties are in disagreement in the GP’s last sentence which you quoted in your reply:
“They just disagree on which government that should be.”
GP claims: Both the RoC and the PRC agree that mainland China and the island of Taiwan are "China", and they both agree that one government should be in control. They just disagree on which government that should be. This is false. The PRC believes that, and the RoC, currently, does not.
In more detail, the RoC’s KMT/pan-Blue coalition agrees with the PRC that the two are one China but disagrees on which government should be in charge. But, while they governed the RoC exclusively before free elections and intermittently since, they aren’t the RoC or its currently governing faction.
The DPP/pan-Green coalition, which has been dominant for several years in the RoC disagrees with the KMT and PRC and sees the PRC and RoC as two separate, geographically distinct states.
If Russia will "collapse" economically (so far it hasn't, not really) it won't be just because their relations with Europe broke down, but because a united front that includes Europe, but also the US, Canada, Australia, and most of their allies has all decided to impose sanctions.
Yes but much of Russia’s exports are commodities, which are traded on a global market. If Russia loses Europe, they can find other buyers. They may have to adjust the price, but they will still be able to sell to somebody.
It’s different from China which is exporting far more finished goods. If America stops buying high end electronics from Chinese factories and starts buying from Vietnamese factories, then those exports just vanish from China’s economy. There is no backup America to buy the goods to keep the factories running.
The logic of the sanctions is that in the long term they prevent Russia from profitably exporting by denying them any imports to improve their productivity.
In simpler terms, how can you just switch to a different market when the pump to make the gaz is unavailable to you.
It becomes pretty hard to do business or build internation relationships when you assume that the other side will stop being rational at any point in time.
Imagine it from the other side of the table: would any country rely on US companies for their OS or business tools if tomorrow the US could start a war against them ?
That's a possibility that is never frown away, and any countries with enough resources will make efforts to mitigate it, but that can't be the base assumption behind the relationship.
Hah, funny you bring that issue up. When Trump was president, indeed other countries regarded the USA as having stopped being rational. I can’t even begin to tell you how bewildering it was to watch that shitshow from over the pond — let alone the storming of the capitol, and Trump not being declared an enemy of the people after. That was the lowest point in your history. There was just so much lost that day.
What’s worse, when he’ll inevitably be elected again, our trust in the US as a partner will be gone completely.
Not a trump supporter, but in both Russia and China he appears to have been spot on, where everyone else has been wrong. Remember his so called ties to Russia? He even warned Germany not be reliant on them for gas, while they snickered at him.
Will they also include the fact that it's extremely hard to execute a naval invasion without absolute air and sea superiority in that calculation? They would probably do worse than Russia did in Ukraine even without direct American involvement. China could only feasibly annex Taiwan peacefully (at least in the foreseable future)
The window for China to successfully execute an amphibious assault on Taiwan is closed.
It would be a cluserfuck of the highest order.
It would also be telegraphed years in advance just by the sheer number of troops and landing craft needed and they would not have air or naval superiority in any realistic scenario.
Taiwan is heavily defended.
Taiwan can be destroyed (nukes) but cannot be annexed by force in any realistic assessment of capability.
I think a naval blockade is most likely. If they block all ships in and out (except food), then the Taiwan economy will crumble. Taiwan will be forced to negotiate for a peaceful annexation. Also, they will take the islands very close to Fujian province on Day One. Just like Russia took Crimea. If the US military tries to interfere, China will threaten to nuke the US, so US military will back down. There will be a global depression for many reasons: (1) no chip exports from TSMC, (2) the whole industrialised world will try to decouple from China ASAP -- like Russia but with 100x economic impact.
To be clear: I don't like any of these scenarios, but this is my "real politik" view. None of it would be rational for Mainland China, but it is a dictatorship. Dictators don't play by the rules.
Love how you jump from a naval blockade of taiwan to threatening to nuke the US.
The US might not get involved in an all out war over Taiwan but they are likely to support Taiwan in case China attempts a blockade. The US frequently undertakes freedom of navigation drills and would most likely exercise such rights to circumvent China.
Now, will that escalate to a direct conflict is debatable but any genuine threats of nuking US would probably taken as a declaration of war.
Here is my reasoning for China threatening to use a nuclear bomb against the US. Imagine a series of events like this:
1. Chinese naval blockade of Taiwan
2. US will send navy + air force from Japan bases.
3. No shots fired between US and China (too risky due to both nuclear powers).
4. Optional: China may immediately claim sovereignty over Taiwan without negotiations with Taiwanese gov't.
5. China will declare that any attack on Chinese military (in the area) or military aid to Taiwan will be viewed as an "invasion" (whatever that term really means). Thus, China will declare that the use of nuclear weapons is valid to protect against invasion by US military.
6. This declaration will be interpreted by US as a nuclear threat.
7. China will refute this US claim.
8. Conclusion: US-China stalement with words only. China takes Taiwan.
To refine my earlier post, simply threatening to (nuclear) bomb / torpedo a US navy carrier strike group is enough. No need to threaten US territory. I'm not sure ICMBs from mainland China can reach mainland US, but they can certainly hit Hawai'i and other US posessions. Also, they have nuclear warheads on subs. I doubt they will work on first try, but the threat is great enough to force US to standdown.
Lastly, I don't like or support any of this, but, it is the most likely scenario.
Taiwan can't, but didn't I hear about one of their neighbours doing such a thing? Oh yeah... Australia. Funnily enough, the contract for the next-gen fleet they were building with France got cancelled and re-made with the US + UK, which is an interesting coincidence considering who the largest non-Chinese force in that region is.
About your last clause: <<which is an interesting coincidence considering who the largest non-Chinese force in that region is>>
I assume you are referring to the United States. Is the US military based in East Asia larger than Japan Self-Defence Forces? Honestly, I'm not sure. JSDF is much larger than most people realize. And to be clear, the UK has almost no presence in East Asia now. Every few years, they have a global tour, but nothing else.
And regarding the Australia submarine deal, France would only build diesel-electric subs. US+UK promised to help Australia build nuclear subs. To me, that is the #1 reason why Australia cancelled the France deal. I am sure they negotiated for months behind the scenes to upgrade to nuclear. When rejected, they announced the Ausuk deal.
In terms of largest number of people, sure the JSDF might be larger, but in terms of raw fire power, I don't think anything comes close to America. And it's not like America has just one or two bases in the region to project from.
I agree with your comment about "power projection". Yes, nothing compares to US in APAC. That said, I do think the technical prowess of JSDF Navy is under-rated. They have some very advanced equipment and have excellent integration with US forces. However, Mainland China is a serious counter-threat to US regional military dominance. Honestly, it is weird that China is investing so much in aircraft carriers. After the 2005 Swedish HSMS Gotland training incidents with a new US carrier, it was demonstrated that the era of _effective_ invicibility for carrier groups is over. It was already true, but less obvious, during the Falklands War with the Agentine carrier that was kept out of action by the mere _threat_ of highly advanced UK subs. Asymmetric warfare is the future. Mainland China should be investing more in asymmetric warfare (crouching tiger / samurai type of stuff: air/ocean/undersea drones, submarines, hypersonic missiles, etc.)
The more I look at it, the more the ancient siege seems more likely than an invasion.
China doesn't want to destroy Taiwan.
Plus, destroying non-Taiwanese vessels and planes trying to break the siege seems like it would be more palatable to Chinese leaders' domestic audience.
China seemed to do a dress rehearsal for this strategy a month or two ago.
The US would recreate the Berlin Airlift in that case. If China wants to shoot down US military cargo aircraft, well... they might as well have launched a full-scale invasion. It will cost them just as much.
That's not what they're going to do. They're going to lay thousands of smart mines. The US military ships will have to either spend weeks demining, shoot down Chinese mine-layers and fire the first shot, commit suicide, or give up.
I don't think you understand how modern naval mines work. In relatively shallow waters, bottom mines can be employed, which are not visible on sonar, and they use a variety of sensors so that it is incredibly difficult to trick them into detonating. Others burrow underground at higher depths still and then fire a torpedo at passing ships. So generally modern mines have to be disabled one-by-one, and without firing on Chinese forces, the Chinese would be laying more mines than the US Navy can disable. It will definitely take weeks if a path is ever completed.
Even fairly primitive mines in relatively smaller numbers (scarcely more than a thousand - China has at least 100,000) in the Iraq War were able to score a mission kill and a major hit on US ships. And that was without US ships actually docking in Iraq.
Do you know how long it took to sweep just over 1000 of those quite primitive mines in Iraq? Around 3 months.
If you look at the iPhone, China's contribution is basically only final assembly. The parts that are being assembled actually come from US/Japan/Korea/Taiwan - so it's not quite as straightforward as it seems.
PRC went from capturing $8 in final assembly fees on iphone3s to ~$100 / ~25% of BOM cost of iPhone X. More highend PRC components are making their way as well (hence YMTC about to get boot). PRC is also like 1/3 of semi market (400B), that's a lot of western semi R&D that industrial policy like 52B CHIPs act spread over multiple years isn't close to replacing.
Probably Russia has made the same calculation about Germany. The biggest economy in Europe entirely dependent on Russian energy. If their "special operation" actually lasted a couple of weeks as they promised (it's hard to believe Germany didn't know about this way in advance), it is unlikely Europe, under German leadership, would have done anything apart from token sanctions.
The contributing factor was of course the US and NATO projecting weakness after debacle in Afghanistan.
Putin high on his own delusions, surrounded by yes-men, thought that was the once in a lifetime opportunity to pounce.
If European economies weren't so dependent on Russian energy supplies, this war could probably have ended much quicker and thousands wouldn't have died needlessly.
> it's hard to believe Germany didn't know about this way in advance
Considering that their spy chief was caught "pants down" in Kyiv when invasion started [0] and had to be evacuated by special forces it is highly likely they had no clue. Unless of course they intentionally orchestrated the whole debacle to look like they didn't know, but that sounds more like a conspiracy theory...
Germany's the richest EU country and doesn't hesitate to throw its weight around to get things done their way which is why many refer to the EU as having a German leadership and it's why many other EU countries are unhappy as some German policies are highly unpopular at EU level (supporting illegal mass migration, anti-nuclear "green" stance while burning gas and coal, long term pro-Russian stance, etc.), as are their politicians at EU level like Ursula who have a track record of incompetence and corruption yet are still in power.
It still has way more influence than any other EU member and can push its internal agenda more easily.
And since it's also the biggest market in the EU, whatever quirky internal rules and regulations Germany has, get pretty much automatically carried out at EU level by any and all companies looking to do business in the EU.
We won't stop eating beef 3x a day even though we know it's literally destroying the world, we still buy diamonds mined by child slaves and clothes sewn by people making pennies per hour and even the sanctions against Russia carved out exceptions for everything the West really wanted/needed.
We didn't stop doing business with China for a genocide in Tibet, an ongoing genocide against the Uyghurs in Xinjiang, the brutality in Hong Kong or the human rights violations in current lockdowns.
If China invades Taiwan, we'll buy iPhones from them anyway and tweet that we don't like what they're doing. Maybe we'll send a few billion dollars to Lockheed and Raytheon to make some weapons for Taiwain, but we won't do anything that actually requires an American to give up the slightest bit of comfort.
An invasion of Taiwan would be a major disruption to global semiconductor industry even if we kept buying from China in the meantime because it would grind TSMC to a halt. There is no way we could switch manufacturing over to Samsung, or spin up fabs elsewhere for that volume of chips.
You have it backwards. Manufacturing iPhones is much easier than designing iPhones. Apple can manufacture somewhere else, but China can't Apple somewhere else.
The context of this conversation is the root level comment noting a Bloomberg article where it's stated it would take them 8 years to move 10% of their manufacturing capacity to other countries from China.
Now, it still may be true that it's easier to manufacture iPhones than design them, but easier does not mean easy. Personally, I think you're just vastly underestimating how hard it is to manufacture iPhones at scale, which means not just finding the right part, but a part that can be delivered in the quantity and quality required to meet their production needs, and repeated for all the parts they need.
Patents are worthwhile only as far as they are respected. A factory is a real asset employing many real people.
Anyway, why does SV have a lock on design? If anything computer design has gotten very stale since the early 90s when all the competitors to American computer systems finally croaked
> Or it's a very good thing for keeping tensions under control with both countries benefiting drastically from keeping the relationship functional.
IMHO, that's a free market myth made "true" through constant repetition. It breaks down if one or more parties stops prioritizing things like a free marketer.
And "keeping tensions under control" could translate to "appease the CCP and give in to its demands." It controls the real (physical) assets, as well as most of the human capital. Its adversaries are democracies, which means they're often far too focused on the people's parochial, short-term whims (e.g. failing to take strategic action because they're afraid of losing votes if those actions make iPhones more expensive).
The CCP has also has the benefit of learning from several of Russia's mistakes. They'll probably force their demands more slowly and persistently, so as to not galvanize their opponents.
Exactly. It was this theory that allowed the West to trade with Russia regardless of her human rights abuses, but it still didn’t deter a pointlessly costly war.
The argument could be made that it worked pretty well for over 20 years. Russia played fairly nice with the west pretty much up until they invaded Crimea.
It'd obviously be a mistake to say that economic interconnectivity totally prevents war, but the fact that wars break out doesn't falsify the notion that it might make conflict less common on average. The west's relationship with Russia and China has certainly been less rocky over the past 30 years than its relationship with the Soviet Union ever was.
> The argument could be made that it worked pretty well for over 20 years. Russia played fairly nice with the west pretty much up until they invaded Crimea.
20 years is actually not a long time for an idea like we're talking about. This isn't human-scale stuff.
> The argument could be made that it worked pretty well for over 20 years
Uhm, this isn't the first time Russia invaded Ukraine in the past decade. Remember when they invaded and took Crimea?
Also, they've been fucking with elections in other countries, like with Brexit and Trump. There was also the Wirecard scandal that they've been associated with. They've done massive amounts of damage internationally.
Yes, I mentioned it. That was in 2014 - 22 years after the fall of the Soviet Union.
Russia's antics have been damaging but child's play compared to the cold war. The US and the Soviet Union were engaged in proxy wars, insurgencies, coups and counter coups across the globe pretty much non-stop for nearly 50 years, all the while pointing two order-of-magnitude larger nuclear arsenals at each other.
Economic interdependence obviously didn't stop Russia from eventually going off the deep end. But it probably helped keep relations cool for quite a while.
If countries are still trading with the US despite US murdering 1 million in Iraq and even as of this very moment killing whomever cant pay for healthcare, there is no problem with any other country trading with any other country.
> The US is not the country actively committing genocide
The country that claims that there is a genocide in Xinjiang is the country that lied for EIGHT years about nonexistent Iraqi WMDs. And its the US.
Every. Single. Muslim majority country backed China at the UN after sending representatives to Xinjiang. They said that there is no such thing as a 'genocide' there. Its the US State Dept. word versus every single muslim majority country and their parliamentarians.
...
Today its easy to understand why people bought into the Iraqi WMDs lie back then: Because it makes them feel good, righteous, and the 'right side'.
Yeah, no. The difference between the WMDs and Xinjiang is that for one we only had the State Department’s word for it, and there was no evidence, while for the other there are numerous independent groups that have provided evidence, there are interviews with many of the people involved, and many people outside of China have had their relatives lose contact with them because of it. There are so many independent sources that it’s silly to compare it to something like Iraq.
As for the other Muslim-majority countries, I can’t find any news backing your statement, but that might be my own lack of Google-fu or perhaps an international underreporting by the media, so I’ll take your word for it. But still, that’s not evidence. All of those countries have little to gain from speaking out at the UN (it won’t actually directly help anyone), and they don’t necessarily feel much inter-Islam brotherhood since the genocide in Xinjiang is against a specific group of Muslims, not against Muslims in general. (Almost?) all of those countries on the other hand are receiving aid from China, which presumably is conditional on saying that there’s no genocide in Xinjiang.
Just looking at Pakistan, for example: Pakistan has been given tens of billions of dollars by China and is owed billions more, China is a major trading of Pakistan, and China is investing in major infrastructure development there. I don’t think anything could get Pakistan to not support China in the UN.
> Yeah, no. The difference between the WMDs and Xinjiang is that for one we only had the State Department’s word for it
No, we didn't. We had the word of every single insitution in the Angloamerican controlled part of the Western hemisphere. From NGOs to media. NYT was publishing dozens of articles talking about the WMDs, then one article 'questioning' whether we were "acting too fast", but inevitably concluding that the risks of 'not taking action' were far greater.
It was a TOTAL media propaganda just like now.
The French were even ridiculed for contesting the veracity of those claims. So much propaganda was done that they were able to smear an ENTIRE nation as 'surrender monkeys' and 'cowards' for persisting in questioning the claims.
> Just looking at Pakistan, for example: Pakistan has been given tens of billions of dollars by China and is owed billions more, China is a major trading of Pakistan, and China is investing in major infrastructure development there. I don’t think anything could get Pakistan to not support China in the UN.
This is a supremacist talk: "They are siding with the baddies for profit". Whereas on the other hand, the Western satellites that supported the US in the UN have absolutely no profit in backing the US. They just did it out of goodwill and morals. Nothing related to profit and foreign policy.
Qatar and Turkey abstained in order to not upset the US. Abstaining itself is already opposing since there is no way that any country in the Middle East can turn a blind eye to an actual genocide of muslims if it took place. Which makes it even more significant that every other country opposed it.
> since the genocide in Xinjiang is against a specific group of Muslims, not against Muslims in general
There is no such thing. I don't know where you pulled that out from. Xinjiang muslims are sunnis and the majority of the muslim world is sunni.
This rhetoric is the reason why we're in the situation we're in now.
China doesn't care for niceties, they will fleece everyone for all they are worth at the first and every opportunity to advance their own agenda which is very clearly not aligned with western interests.
Put another way, you know who's funding the Chinese military? We (the west) are. We are funding the very regime who would sooner see us dead than alive. There is no room for the west in their One China vision.
That train of thought used to be true, but with the EU and Russia, it seems not to be true as much.
Will be interesting to see how this plays out. The US can get along without Apple (although 401K's might take a big hit), but China without Apple would be a pretty big issue, even if you only look at it from an employment viewpoint.
That train of thought was used to argue that a big war was impossible in Europe ... in 1913. Politics is not economics and economics is not politics. It takes a very deep ignorance of history to think otherwise.
Yeah this makes sense. Kinda like how Europe depends on Russia for oil and gas and Russia imports a number of high tech goods from Europe. That’s why conflict between the two is highly unlikely.
It didn't work out for europe either, considering we'll be pretty fucked this winter.
US of course gains a lot... weakening both russia and EU while selling overpriced LPG. On the other hand, US has been afraid of a strong germany-russia cooperation for decades and has done everything possible to stop it,... the us-bombing-nordstream accusations are not something new, since US was opposed to nordstream and threatened against it for years now, way before the russia-ukraine war.
Not really. Russia put enormous effort to bribe German politicians. Ex chancellor for example. I don’t think, that China is bribing Apple. They go there voluntarily.
Nearly all of the energy available on Earth comes from our sun, including all fossil fuels, shallow geothermal, biomass, hydro, tidal, wave, wind and solar energies. The remainder came from other suns, such as nuclear and deep geothermal.
Cool thing to think about, sure, but I can't put an empty barrel outside and have the sun fill it up with oil. If you know how to do this, please let me know.
Deep/shallow geothermal (and hydro, tidal, wave, wind, solar) have those pesky borders and politics to deal with when looking to harness them. One country can't arbitrarily go to some other country and harness their geothermal, erect solar panels or wind turbines, etc.
The parent posters were, extremely obviously, not having a discussion on where various energy sources originated from in a science sense, but the politics surrounding the trade of those resources.
> but I can't put an empty barrel outside and have the sun fill it up with oil.
Sure you could. Just place it next to the output of a solar press and extract oil from sunflower seeds or others, let it pour into the barrel until full, replace with an empty barrel, and repeat. When you have enough oil stocked, you can use it to manipulate the market, make a fortune, start a war, takeover the world, eliminate borders, whatever you like, the sky's the limit with an empty barrel and a little sun.
I think the point being made is that if Apple/whoever was willing to pay for it, you can setup the supply chain and get the workers wherever you want. It might cost more, sure, but it can be done.
However, you can't just extract energy from somewhere that doesn't have it. No matter how much money you want to sink into it. If there's no oil/NG/whatever, that's that. Trillions of dollars wont make it appear there. Trillions of dollars does let you setup a nice supply chain and labor force in the US though.
Under Merkel, Germany got 50% of their natural gas from Russia - with the intention of normalising relations and keeping tensions under control.
Then Russia decided they could invade a neighbour they claim isn't a real country - and now Germany is in for a very cold winter, and gas shortages are sending bills skyrocketing all across Europe.
If trade was supposed to stop Russia invading its neighbours, it hasn't worked very well.
Well, the theory relies on assuming rationality from the Russian leadership. If a madman wants to invade a neighbour, there are few reliable ways to prevent that.
> If a madman wants to invade a neighbour, there are few reliable ways to prevent that.
Does being a neighbor matter here?
Because if a madmen attacks a country half a planet away, we (the europeans) help them by sending our soldiers to help (syria, libya, afghanistan,...).
We also tend to treat separatists differently, depending on where and who they are... Kosovo people want to be independent, let them be independent, and think later how to (re)paint nato as a purely defensive organization, when the nato bombings of yugoslavia are over. People from republika srpska also want to leave bosnia and hercegovina... no no, the country must stay whole, we won't change maps. Catalunya? What? Where? Who? Sorry, I have to go.
> Because if a madmen attacks a country half a planet away, we (the europeans) help them by sending our soldiers to help (syria, libya, afghanistan,...).
What on Earth are you talking about, and what does it have to do with anything?
> We also tend to treat separatists differently, depending on where and who they are... Kosovo people want to be independent, let them be independent, and think later how to (re)paint nato as a purely defensive organization, when the nato bombings of yugoslavia are over.
Wanting to separate is one thing, being the subject of a credible ethnic cleansing campaign is another.
US has attacked numerous sovereign countries, and we did nothing against them and even helped them. Numerous european/nato countries have solders occupying sovereign countries even today (even my shitty small one has soldiers in syria now), and noone cares about those countries, those people and those agressors (well.. us, agressors).
Why are we acting differently now? I mean.. I know.. "it's ok when we do it", but atleast stop with the bullshit about sovereing states and lives, because we didn't care when we did the occupations and we still don't care while we're occupying those countries now.
And again, I'm from a small shitty country, and our soldiers are currently occupying syria... countries like france, have a lot longer lists of occupied countries, and countries like america should be sanctioned to oblivion decades ago.
> Wanting to separate is one thing, being the subject of a credible ethnic cleansing campaign is another.
> US has attacked numerous sovereign countries, and we did nothing against them and even helped them. Numerous european/nato countries have solders occupying sovereign countries even today (even my shitty small one has soldiers in syria now), and noone cares about those countries, those people and those agressors (well.. us, agressors).
> Why are we acting differently now? I mean.. I know.. "it's ok when we do it", but atleast stop with the bullshit about sovereing states and lives, because we didn't care when we did the occupations and we still don't care while we're occupying those countries now.
Again, what on earth does any of this have to do with anything?
> yes, and iraq has weapons of mass destruction.
Iraq is what it looks like when the US decides they're going to invade and manufactures an excuse. The WMD claim was bullshit, everyone at the time knew it was bullshit, anyone whose opinion was worth anything was calling them out on their bullshit. That's not evidence that the core claims about Kosovo (which are disputed by, at most, a handful of cranks) were false, it's evidence of the opposite; if the reason that even people critical of the US invasion agreed that the ethnic cleansing was happening is because of some all-powerful propaganda conspiracy, how come that all-powerful propaganda conspiracy wasn't deployed to the same effect for the invasion of Iraq?
Kruschev was crazy. Ortega was crazy. Saddam was crazy. Gaddafi was crazy. Putin is crazy. Now they are saying that Xi is 'enigmatic'. In 1-2 years, they will start saying that he is 'mentally unstable'.
- Russia believed the war would be over in a few days (which many in the West also believed)
- Russia assumed Europe would keep buying their oil (which has happened to an extent)
- Russia believes they can "out-suffer" the West and we will crack after a few months
- Russia believed the West was too polarized to reach consensus on an effective response
In short, Russia had a bad read on the situation and shot themselves in the foot. They thought they were in a position to impose their will without a fight or a significant response from the West.
We have seen a little bit of the same attitude from China the past several years - decadent West on the decline, democracy is flawed, etc. - but I have to think they are smart enough to realize they have been underestimating us. At a minimum, I think it pushes back their timeline for when they believed they would become the world's premier power. Hopefully, that buys us all some time to cool off and find diplomatic solutions.
I don't think diplomatic solutions are possible when one side says "this land that we don't currently occupy is ours", especially when the people in charge view admitting they were mistaking as a existential personal failure. The best you can hope for is balance-of-power detente.
That is a very complicated question, but in short:
Russia’s economy is supported by oil. Oil is pretty much the one thing that they’ve still been consistently able to export.
China’s economy is based on exporting lots and lots and lots of manufactured goods. Many of them are essential, but many of them could be banned tomorrow.
It’s not a complicated question. It’s a very simple question with a simple answer: one man (Vladimir Putin) wanted to go to war and made the (initial and ongoing) decision despite it being a clearly terrible idea to anyone else watching.
How Russia got itself to the point where one person has consolidated all authority, surrounded himself with corrupt sycophants, and cannot accurately gather or integrate information from the rest of the society is the complicated question here. It’s a pretty good demonstration for anyone watching around the world that unchecked power can lead to disastrous decisions. It should inspire us to stand up for democracy and against corruption and consolidation of wealth and power in our own societies.
It’s impossible to determine Putin’s personal motivations from outside; the best we can do is speculate. My speculation is that involves some combination of (a) doing what he thinks will best maintain internal political control, (b) satisfying an egoistical urge for historical glory, and (c) a narcissistic belief that others must bow to his personal whims and a raging narcissistic grudge when they do not.
>It’s impossible to determine Putin’s personal motivations from outside; the best we can do is speculate.
Russia has no convenient geographic features to protect it from invasion, so it relies on long distances. Those distances are much shorter than they used to be, and Russian doctrine for at least the past decade has been focused on creating confusion and chaos in Eastern Europe. The chaos is here, and they probably misread the international community on what they could get away with.
Now that they're in it, though, I think Putin is the biggest obstacle to Russia extricating themselves from the debacle.
There are a whole bunch of people in the “whole state organ” who were opposed to one extent or another. Some of them mysteriously fell out of windows or shot themselves in the back of the head. Others were fired or jailed. Others were publicly humiliated. The rest fell into line.
Invading Ukraine certainly wasn’t, say, Elvira Nabiullina’s choice, or the choice of the oligarchs with homes in London or NYC. The turnover rate at the top ranks of the Russian military the past 6 months is higher than a typical McDonalds.
> It’s impossible to determine Putin’s personal motivations from outside;
Entitlement. The closest you came was the descriptor "narcissistic" in (c). Narcissism is supposed to be a rare condition, but it is found everywhere. It is easiest to understand leaders like Putin, Jong-un, Xi, DeSantis and Trump, if framed in psychological terms like narcissism with symptoms of entitlement, grandiosity, attention seeking, arrogance, bullying, lack of empathy, and a fear of criticism.
The opposite, actually — people NEED Russia’s oil. They don’t have the option to stop buying it without a lot of pain. So Russia’s biggest money-fountain has stayed on despite sanctions.
Meanwhile, China exports a lot of things that people don’t need. You can turn those off quicker.
Again — huge oversimplifications. But I think reasonably solid mental model.
> Meanwhile, China exports a lot of things that people don’t need. You can turn those off quicker.
It's not like that's all they export. They export a lot of essential things, and cutting them off would probably far more economically disruptive to their customers than to them. They're store shelves won't be empty, and given their political system they can probably deal with the fallout much more effectively.
There are also a lot of alternative producers of oil, while there's no other advanced manufacturing giant on the scale of China that people can shift their orders to. It would make the COVID supply chain difficulties look like a joke.
Russia has even put their energy exports at risk though. They are already trading at a discount and things could get much worse if the war continues to escalate. If Putin advances to using nukes or mass slaughtering of civilians, things will eventually reach a point where the neutral countries finally cut ties.
Russia starting a nuclear war would be bad for China, India and others; there's some point at which they'll cut off Russian trade.
I understand your snark is simply meant to signal your sympathy towards war crime negationism, but the Gulf War incubator reference does happen to be on topic and not in the way you may have intended.
That's what the Europeans thought when they signed up to making themselves so energy dependent on the Russians. They thought they were creating a two-way dependency that would moderate excessive behaviour and "keep the relationship functional". That's not how it's worked out.
Are you sure about that? A million people losing their jobs can have an impact.
"It is the world's largest technology manufacturer and service provider. While headquartered in Taiwan, the company is the largest private employer in the People's Republic of China and one of the largest employers worldwide."
Yes, but Foxconn is not Apple subsidiary. Apple is just one of their customers. Saying million would lose job because Apple moved out of China seems like hyperbole from the other side.
So, what will people in the rest of the world buy then? There won't be new iphones for years, and foxconn will continue to make phones for other manufacturers, whose sales will go up.
AAPL is a good chunk of the S&P 500, close to 10% of its market cap.
I don't think a loss of value to the tune of $2.5T would go well for the US economy.
I don't think either country cares much about unemployment, but the US, at least, has a history of going to great lengths to maintain the value of its assets.
And I'm sure there are companies eagerly awaiting to get the business Foxconn turned down because Apple outbid them or made favorable agreements.
They need Apple in the sense that AAPL is represented in many different financial instruments, products and portfolios, and it tanking would have consequences outside of shareholders just losing value.
The old "armies will cross borders if goods don't argument." A comforting and hopeful delusion.
People made the exact same arguments in the early 1900s, they became convinced after international incident after international incident became solved without bloodshed none would. They argued that because the economies we're so intertwined with Germany being the world's leading producer of electrical appliances that were being used in English homes no one would ever want to fight a war there would be nothing to gain and everything to lose. The British in particular as the financial capital of the world pushed and leaned on this narrative hard, nothing would be more disruptive to their fiance and capital schemes than a large scale conflict. Every country in the world had treaties and agreements to try and avoid anything happening.
Then in 1914 a young disgruntled Serbian nationalist that didn't care about the economy or international relations, who cared only about the existential emptiness he had cured with fanatical nationalism assassinated the Archduke of a relatively minor European power that was considered to be on its way out.
It turns out in a national scramble for survival the economy is considered a cheap thing, especially when the actual cost is being paid in the blood of tens of thousands of young men each day.
So let me ask you this question if you are convinced that it will be too expensive to let these tensions explode, as thousands of feet march to the beat, what would you say is the price of a mile?
We've seen a clear failure of this logic in Ukraine. Russia interpreted the interdependence as a license, not a leash.
The most likely source of conflict between the US and the CCP is Taiwan, and this is an issue where reduction to economic incentives utterly fails to describe potential events.
You need to read up on philosophy. Mostly Hegel’s Dialectics. These two statements are not contradictory and are both simultaneously true.
dialectics (used with a sing. verb) A method of argument or exposition that systematically weighs contradictory facts or ideas with a view to the resolution of their real or apparent contradictions. The contradiction between two conflicting forces viewed as the determining factor in their continuing interaction.
Appeasing a dictatorship (both mafia-style as in Russia, and Communist-style as in China/North Korea) isn't a good idea in the long run - especially if they have nuclear weapons. The barbarism we've seen in Ukraine is an example. On the other side of the world, Taiwan is threatened with war every week.
Further strengthening China's manufacturing capacity is not in the interest of democracies.
has the "mcdonalds diplomacy" thing really worked out? because we've seen countries that were getting better (Iran) fall and countries that should have gotten better (Russia) fail to do so.
There's so many developing countries that could make tons of $$ by adopting manufacturing. All of Africa, South East Asia (vietnam et al are rising quickly), maybe parts of South America and Eastern Europe, and even Central Asia.
If I was the leader in any of those regions I'd be figuring out how to become #2 or #3 to Chin and India ASAP. But I guess they all have their own local problems to excuse away why they don't.
You’re assuming that leaders of these countries are largely benevolent. They’re optimizing for their own interests. Bringing manufacturing into these countries will only introduce new competitors to their rule over time. Think of Saudi for instance, they can bring manufacturing and they import workforce if necessary from India , Africa, Asia and Europe but they won’t. They’re happy with the oil sector because that’s easy to control.
What's the difference between China, India, and the early western country vs these countries then? Why is this unique to a limited subset who have the potential become a big player in manufacturing?
Nigeria is projected to have a population in the top 3 (china, india, then nigeria) in the next 30yrs. The population excuse will soon not be good enough anymore.
A strong culture of corruption and self-interested politicians is pretty common but I feel like there's some lack of proper messaging or a lack of simple interest in having big goals. There seems to be a defeatist culture in many of these places, where they are so used to the status quo they forget they still have a choice if enough people cared.
Maybe brain drain is the true killer in our global economy. The smart kids don't even bother, they just move to the west or help India/China.
>What's the difference between China, India, and the early western country vs these countries then? Why is this unique to a limited subset who have the potential become a big player in manufacturing?
Mostly revenues from natural ressources.
Rents allows much more centralized control of the political and economical equilibrium in the country. And it's easier to manage.
Despotic regimes that industrialize (like China or Vietnam) usually do it out of necessity : either because they can't make enough out of natural ressources to provide sufficiently to their subjects or because they need to have some level of strategic independence.
The leaders of Vietnam are - well, it's complicated and there's a lot of corruption and weird cultural stuff to overcome. I don't mean Vietnamese cultural stuff, I mean the culture of the Vietnamese government.
But somewhere behind that I do believe they have a vision for the country. I have lived here for 5 years now and I see a country going though a rapid transition from extreme poverty (just 20-30 years ago) to now, in places like Da Nang, Quy Nhon, Dalat, parts of HCMC and Hanoi, being fairly developed and rapidly becoming more so. Apparently they have lifted a million people per year out of extreme poverty for the last 30 years and there's a rapidly growing middle class too.
Of course, from those areas, you can just drive 50km (or even just down a side street in a big city) and be in an area that seems like it hasn't been touched by development, although you can still probably get a 200mb internet connection in these places. And there are entire provinces that are still very poor. It's a big and complicated country on a winding but largely positive trajectory. Don't dismiss the leaders here in the same breathe as the Saudis. They have their own highly complex and developed culture, with both good and bad sides, and you need to take the time to understand it before you can comment on it.
If I was in industry, I would bet on this country as being a good place for manufacturing. Right now, for low-medium tech stuff. But in ten or twenty years I predict this country will be a high tech manufacturing hub.
My fear is that while wealth has increased greatly in Vietnam, it has dragged along with it major shifts in motivation (greed) and happiness (materialism) and a reduced value of community… a shift that, (cynically on my part), may be more in the leaders interest than in the peoples. Ah capitalism.
But this is not just an issue with Vietnam, it can be true in any country… just more visible amidst the transition that I saw a small small bit of in the early 2000s there.
Is the transition “good” in an ultimate sense? I (with you) hope so… but my gut says otherwise. Do the weeds grow faster than the grass when fertilizer is thrown down? We’ll see. All the best to you.
(I agree with your core point that from a western perspective, high tech manufacturing in Vietnam likely makes good sense as a China diversification play.)
> But Bloomberg Intelligence estimates it would take about eight years to move just 10% of Apple’s production capacity out of China, where roughly 98% of the company’s iPhones have been made.
98% of the iPhones that have been made already, not 98% of iPhones currently being made. So the percentage is probably somewhat lower as of present.
Definitely not ideal. Moving away from China is good but I wonder how much of this is PR. It wouldn't make sense to move given they spent $275B building up Chinese manufacturing.
> Moving away from China is good but I wonder how much of this is PR.
Some of it is PR, but the reality is that wages have been rising in China and other countries like India are cheaper.
And, Apple spent $275B as part of a shakedown to avoid Chinese regulations. If Apple didn't start moving their business after that, the people running it are fools. I suspect Apple would be much further along on that if Covid hadn't hit in the middle of this.
Economic interdependence is studied in the theory of International Relations.
As other commenters have pointed out, interdependence is variously seen as preventing or leading to conflict. The former in the Liberalist school, when two countries both see war as too costly to their mutual interests. The latter in the Realist school, when interdependence is weaponized as a point of control or viewed as vulnerability.
The trade expectations model (Copeland) argues that high existing interdependence but declining expectations leads to conflict, while a statusquo that is relatively independent but with increasing expectations can be peace-inducing. I admit the expectations model is somewhat circular reasoning, cyclical really. Though it is statistically explanative of historical conflicts in the 19th and 20th century.
Is Apple really that important though? Sure, consumers love their Apple products but there are certainly plenty of alternatives for just about everything they make. If the US lost China as a trade partner, the entire consumer electronics industry would be in big trouble.
Everything is replaceable but it is a major business. Huge ramifications in America if they had a major supply disruption. It’s not about the availability of glass boxes with fruit logos on the back.
The iPhone and other products obviously brings in a lot of money and supports a lot of jobs, indirectly too like through case design and apps and stuff. But China uses apple as an example of how they work with America - so much so that Tim Cook gets meetings with presidents and diplomats. And its supply chain is one of chinas major employers, so it would come at a steep cost to China. A loss of apple would likely impact other businesses soon after. China wouldn’t kill the golden goose without slaughtering the others first, or using them as an example of what’s to come.
Even beyond the iPhone as a product directly, MANY people (especially rich important influential ones) are major shareholders. So are pension funds and retirement funds and index funds. If apple had an “oops no iPhone for a year” moment that would rock the financial world way beyond their actual direct market value. They’re so big that their crash would likely slash the entire tech sector and with it the S&P 500 and with it all the index funds and with it everyone’s retirement accounts (you can see how that ripple would continue to everyone’s detriment). The US government has an interest in keeping them safe for that alone. They can lose market share and be replaced over time, but a geopolitical shock like China closing their ports to apple would be a major event the government has an interest in avoiding.
No. They’re forced to keep businesses safe from outside destruction, not market forces. Basically the same as individuals. The gov also maintains a military for similar reasons. I said this in the reply.
They don’t want a foreign gov to torpedo an important business for politics but they don’t need to protect against market forces. There’s no market risk to apple disappearing overnight. If it’s over a long time scale, pension funds can self manage. It won’t implode the market.
Friendly reminder that Apple is the largest component of SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust (SPY). Most stocks are under 2% representation except Apple and a handful of others.
Top 10 Holdings (27.37% of Total Assets)
Name Symbol % Assets
Apple Inc AAPL 5.90%
Microsoft Corp MSFT 5.60%
Amazon.com Inc AMZN 4.05%
Facebook Inc A FB 2.29%
Alphabet Inc A GOOGL 2.02%
Alphabet Inc Class C GOOG 1.96%
Berkshire Hathaway Inc Class B BRK.B 1.45%
Tesla Inc TSLA 1.44%
NVIDIA Corp NVDA 1.37%
JPMorgan Chase & Co JPM 1.29%
It would solve the problem that if Apple decides to do anything that goes against national interest (they are free to do so) then the government/voters would be able to do something against it.
Your solution to protecting ourselves from being dependent on an authoritarian government is by being authoritarian to our own first? How would nationalizing it help one bit if China decided to block exports?
If the US would have any say in apples politics they wouldnt fully depend on China at this point. It was obvious for years that this will lead to issues and both countries make a huge point in hating on each other.
It is arguable. I would be fine if Apple crashed and burned. I don't use any Apple products. My company does, but Apple folded, I'm sure we would just move to Android or something.
Apple is the only company I have ever seen, that doesn't give business discounts. We pay the same as any Joe off the street. Even Microsoft doesn't do that. Fuck Apple.
It sounds like you have a personal beef with Apple because you don't get special treatment. This has nothing to do with its importance to the US, which is extremely high.
Your personal beef with a company is not a basis for making it "arguable".
And Apple gave even my teensy little company (when it was running) discounts. They have (or at least had) a business program which required some proof of business license (DUN, or summat?), and enjoy your discount. I'd look it up, but parent isn't going to, so I won't bother.
You seem to forget that literally almost every Android phone is also made in China and would be immediately hit with the same sanctions. Every Android phone also has parts made in Taiwan, just like the iPhone, an area that would almost certainly be blockaded in the event of a conflict.
As for your complaints about business discounts... I see it as a win for the consumer that they don't have to be a "business" to artificially pay less. Fuck that.
Samsung farmed 20%/60M units of low end units back to PRC ODMs in 2020 with plans to ramp up % before covid. IIRC there was a BOM break down of Vietnamese made Samsung phones where ~40+% of the components (not by value) were from PRC suppliers and ~25% from SKR. The reality is both SKR and VN are heavily dependant on PRC supply chains and a lot of the supply chains in VN are setup by PRC money.
If there was a skirmish, Vietnam is just south of China, is communist just like China, and would likely find themselves quickly aligned with China over the US. So much so they may as well be the same level of risk.
China and Vietnam fought a war in 1979 and several border skirmishes during the 1980s.
Right now China is claiming control of some of Vietnam's coastal waters including the sinking of Vietnamese fishing vessels, so there are ongoing disputes between the two countries.
Previously Vietnam partnered with the USSR against China. Now that Putin is Xi's closest ally (or wants to be seen that way) Vietnam could well be looking for new allies.
Vietnam has "Three No's" defense policy that will preclude any substantial anti-PRC alignment. There's some wiggle room to posture / hedge with US for theatre in new white paper, but nothing major because the "Three No's" were specifically drafted in 98 after normalizing relations with PRC with appeasement in mind. The war and subsequent border skirmishes thoroughly deindustrialized North manufacturing and set back VN development for decades. VN could have gotten on the export-driven gravy train much earlier, instead it went to PRC. There's very little chance VN will embrace western alliances on tier of PRC/RU "comprehensive strategic partnership" because PRC build up a lot of leverage over the years, including funding (frequently owning) a lot of the supply chains in VN, and via control of hydropower/water/agri resources by influencing upper Mekong Laos. Both Trump/Biden admin have tried to court Vietnam somewhat informed by spurious sentiment that "Vietnamese public hate Chinese, therefore they must be onboard", but went nowhere. TLDR is PRC has a lot of existential leverage over VN, which provides leverage over SKR ontop of existing SKR economic leverage.
No doubt that if apple suddenly and without warning closed shop tomorrow, never made another ianything, and pulled the plug on every last one of their services the world would keep on turning and neither the US or China would collapse. It wouldn't be pretty, a lot of people would lose money, but we'd survive and move on.
China also has a population that’s rapidly aging and shrinking. Its ability to supply inexpensive labor is likely to decline over the next 10-20 years. Considering the time frames involved Apple having a 10-15 year plan to geographically distribute its production makes sense for a lot of reasons.
For iPhones I don’t quite understand the article. The only thing “made” in China is the battery. The phone is only assembled in China. But all the components are made outside of Chinas. Assembly is much easier to move than manufacturing the components.
People said the same thing about the UK and Germany at the beginning of 1914.
That led to tens of thousands of English boys drowning in mud over of the course of days at Paschendale and millions of young German men slaughtered in a line running from the Alps to the coast.
this is an unamerican opinion on hn so I don't expect it to be popular but I would imagine this is a proactive effort by Apple in light of recent and persistent American brinkmanship over China in general. first huawei, then trump, then tiktok, now Taiwan. apple can explain away suicide nets and child labor, but geopolitical turmoil is risk to the shareholder.
At the same time, Apple is big enough it could possibly "disrupt" supply chains and suddenly a new manufacturing center somewhere else and bring the house with it?
Yes but no matter how much money / production capacity you want to bring, at some point it still takes physical time to build all the factories and set up the whole ecosystem. 5 - 10 years sounds about right.
I think the reason they are worried is because Apples luxury gadgets make like 7% of the security of their pension Fonds. Meaning the whole economy could collapse of just this one gadget company can't deliver to the world market anymore.
Funny no one suggests bringing it back to the USA. The margins are good enough on those products, and there is enough room for automation they could do it.
The US was never a bluetooth headphone manufacturing powerhouse. We make other stuff, and we should continue to make the high value goods we are specialized in, not consumer trinkets for low wages. Value added in manufacturing is far more important, and building headphones doesn't do that. Leave that to some other place.
I suspect that you have been listening to too much news entertainment. The US manufacturing industry is as big as it's ever been in terms of real output (not jobs). There has more than a trillion dollars in expansion since the pre-covid peak in manufacturing. The US is #2 in the world for gross manufacturing output, and in the top 10 for value add.
A lot of u.s manufacturing capability for electronics is paid for by military contracts. The U.S manufacturers don't even try to compete with China because military contractors are not allowed to make stuff there.
Why shouldnt the us and the eu plus friends manufacture bluetooth headsets with the aid of high tech robotics? As soon as that type of high volume low price manufacturing moves back you will see a lot more innovation. This will only benefit everyone’s progress including in non aligned countries. The r&d and training to build and create robotics would be rather welcome.
We don’t have the amount of labor, let alone the the rightly skilled labor (I recognize these aren’t “skilled labor” jobs, which we don’t have enough skilled labor for but we also don’t have enough people to do the unskilled labor inline with other parts of the world because we stopped training people for this type of work decades ago) to do this kind of work. We just don’t. Especially not at the volume you would need for stuff like AirPods or Beats.
The Foxconn fiasco in Wisconsin was a grift on many, many levels - but the labor part of it was never taken care of even before that whole thing blew up.
The reality is, if you were to manufacture something like AirPods (let alone an iPhone) in the US, you would be not only doubling or tripling your labor costs, you’d be getting shittier labor for your money. Not to mention the additional expenses and tariffs of having to recenter all of the material imports and parts into the US from other parts of the world.
I’m all for paying better wages throughout the world, even at the expense of profit margin or raised device prices. It’s a lot harder to justify paying more for lesser-quality labor and to upend logistics because of some false idea that “made in America” means anything.
I think you're right but I disagree with your assertion that we couldn't manufacture these products in the US. Certainly we can't overnight, but it doesn't mean we can't at all or that we couldn't or shouldn't try to, generally speaking. Add to the fact that in China in particular as it grows into a more middle income country it no longer becomes the "cheapest place to build stuff" and instead comes more inline with other first-world economies which will cause companies to relocate factories provided cost is a concern, which if it is, it means leaving China and if it's not then there isn't an argument for not relocating outside of China in the first place.
> It’s a lot harder to justify paying more for lesser-quality labor and to upend logistics because of some false idea that “made in America” means anything.
Well it kind of does right? It's a geostrategic concern where certain components or products need to be made in safe harbors. Instability is bad for business, and the fact that we are discussing this proves the point. Made in America doesn't necessarily have to mean the rah-rah Eagles soaring kind of thing, it can also mean actual national security concerns relative to geopolitical and strategic realities that necesitate hire costs that outweigh other benefits.
Totally agree with everything you're saying. Apple products (along with most consumer electronics) simply aren't strategic to national security so they can and will be continued to be made where profit margins are highest modulo tariffs and sanctions.
> Certainly we can't overnight, but it doesn't mean we can't at all or that we couldn't or shouldn't try to, generally speaking.
Ok, but we have tried. A number of times. And it has failed. Ironically, foreign car companies probably do the best job with doing manufacturing plants in the US right now. But many of the experiments to bring manufacturing back to the US, especially with electronics, have failed. See also the Foxconn disaster in Wisconsin that cost billions but never got off the ground. And the attempts by Apple, Motorola and others to make products here. And the flat-out education crisis that has prevented more chip fabs from even being built stateside.
I’m not saying don’t try. But we have tried. And it has failed. Abs the quality of labor is more expensive and worse and I don’t blame any company for looking elsewhere.
> it can also mean actual national security concerns relative to geopolitical and strategic realities that necesitate hire costs that outweigh other benefits.
Ok, but “assembled in America” wouldn’t solve this. Almost every single part — the semiconductor, the memory, the screens, the screws, the plastic or aluminum housings, the batteries, the battery controllers, are made in China or Vietnam or Taiwan. Using minerals sourced from Africa or South America or whatever. So unless you can move the entire supply chain to this region (and we do not have the labor, skilled or unskilled to do any of that), a supply chain that has been carefully and meticulously setup for maximum tax benefits for all parties involved, what benefit is achieved of having a person in America assemble a phone with an SoC and RAM and an SSD that was still made in Asia? If there is a national security concern, that concern will exist whether the product is assembled in Texas or in Shenzhen. If there is going to be a back door, it’ll come in anyway.
Even the solution of building for fabs here (which we should do and should have started investing in at least a decade ago) is difficult because we don’t have the labor figures to staff this fabs. And those fabs are largely skilled jobs. TSMC and others are offering insane amounts of money to college grads to move to Asia to work in the fabs. Intel is way behind on building new fabs and part of that is labor-related. And although Intel is based in the US, it doesn’t make the chips that run in 99% of the world’s electronics.
I’m not saying there aren’t potential security problems. I’m saying that those will exist regardless of where stuff is assembled and that globally, being able to upend the whole state of supply chain and logistics away from Asia and into another geographic area is something that would take a decade on the low-end and the parts of the world that would be well-equipped to take on that sort of load (Vietnam, India, some parts of Central and South America), have their own major geopolitical struggles.
It’s a difficult problem to solve and we should absolutely be less reliant on one region for all of our manufacturing, but we need to acknowledge this isn’t a problem that can be solved quickly or that frankly, the US is well-positioned to solve at all.
>> The reality is, if you were to manufacture something like AirPods (let alone an iPhone) in the US, you would be not only doubling or tripling your labor costs, you’d be getting shittier labor for your money.
The latter part of your statement is very poorly understood by most people on HN and generally the US. Having toured overseas factories that make goods my company contract manufactures... there is no way American workers at 3x the wages could possibly compete in terms of productivity. You're absolutely right, and while I somewhat believed this to be plausible before I visited, after actually seeing how products were made over there in "skilled labor" factories, it's truly insane.
Because India is also putting a lot of effort into submodule production. It's one thing to do final assembly in a location. What India is doing is putting a lot of effort into building the ancillary industries that accompany final assembly. All those discrete resistors and capacitors that go onto the PCB have to be sourced from somewhere. If you run out the line can't do anything. This doesn't happen in cities like Taipei, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen because there's literally infinite amounts of these commodities in the area thanks to all the manufacturers of these commodities.
Nobody in the US makes SMD parts anymore. It's all higher up in the value chain. But those parts, even if they're commodities, still need to be made. India is going for it which is why Apple is diversifying there instead of the US.
Rich people hold most of the shares and they don't want people to know that they're just as self-centered as the rest of us (likely more which is partially what inflated their coffers to begin with, but that's just subjective assumptions).
> Time to put the ESG/political posturing of major financial firms to the test, I suppose?
Fastest way to end ESG posturing I suppose. Although ESG concerns don’t typically include “made in America”. It’s not clear to me how that’s be an ESG thing.
I did and one option in order to keep costs low is to rely more on high end automation. And when there is no capacity then have it spread around allied countries first. It makes sense from a strategic point of view. Countries such as india have no issue, as we see in the comment section and its actions, to look after its own citizens first. Why shouldn't we follow a similar approach? Why send manufacturing to countries that blame their issues on us and first chance they have to take selfish action they do it. Shouldn't we also (by we and us i mean all aligned countries including those in asia and latin america) look after our own first? It feels like so often we help nations develop only to have it backfire later on.
I sort of work much on automation. Once upon a time in a Canada futon factory I worked as summer jobber. They had a automation packing machine that is like getting broken every two or three hours so the whole line of workers have to wait for it to get fixed, like most my later working scenarios.
I do believe I have pretty solid engineering background.
The biggest problem of automation is the mechanical parts are so easy to break down. The second problem is electronic chip mostly last two years, if they are located in a very complex place (inside an engine, tall building roof etc), repair and replacement cost is prohibitive.
Untrained and transient labors hardly think of the two problems.
And a lot of automation in manufacturing doesn’t negate the need for human labor anyway. It’s still faster, more efficient, and better QA in many cases to have humans assemble certain things than to use machines. That won’t be the case forever, but the level that people think that the automation is going to be superior or even faster than the human element is often forgotten.
I agree with you that automation doesn’t necessarily lead to a loss of jobs. It can create opportunities for whole new skills and job types.
The struggle has been, especially in the US, that we haven’t then properly prepared or skilled people to do the new wave of jobs that can’t be automated.
I always think of this article [1] from January 2017:
> When the German engineering company Siemens Energy opened a gas turbine production plant in Charlotte, N.C., some 10,000 people showed up at a job fair for 800 positions. But fewer than 15 percent of the applicants were able to pass a reading, writing and math screening test geared toward a ninth-grade education.
So out of 10,000 applicants, less than 1500 were even qualified to interview for a job, of which they only had 800 positions. That’s a problem but the solution isn’t to shun automation.
> So why was it necessary to shift production to China?
It wasn't necessary. You're conflating necessary with desirable.
The gap between the two is an increased profit margin, which is desirable for most corporations.
Further, the CCP is becoming both dramatically more hostile to business in general and more dangerous as a foe to liberal, democratic nations (including Taiwan most prominently), while simultaneously the financial cost of operating in China has continued to climb by the year (which is a trend that is unlikely to significantly reverse). The China discount for offshoring isn't nearly what it was 15-20 years ago.
The disaster that Russia is causing in Europe is a small hint of what China might cause in Asia in the coming decades. Russia's perceived capabilities weren't nearly what the West thought they were; China's military capabilities are more likely to exceed our expectations (in recent history China has more commonly followed the path of hide your strength and bide your time, as opposed to Russia's vacuous boasting), and it's backed up by a gigantic economy with manufacturing that Russia could only dream of.
Thats the catch. Automating here in the west means we can maintain a lower price while creating jobs that would otherwise be lost altogether. I think returning manufacturing with these constraints in mind is a must.
The issue is that the cartels are now endemic to the region. They're part of the government, they're extorting legal businesses, they're laundering the money and investing into legitimate businesses. You can't just undo their influence.
How does ending the drug war take away 90% of their revenue. If you legalize drugs, the cartels would become legitimate producers and corner the market through fear and intimidation.
#2 Most drugs can just as easily be produced domestically by pharmaceutical companies.
#3 Of the drugs that can't be produced domestically, the Mexican cartels are just middlemen that can be cut out entirely. There's no reason drugs from Colombia need to transit Mexico.
#4 If you're worried about Colombian cartels - see points #1 and #2.
We already went through this with alcohol and organized crime.
No, I comprehend just fine. Parent poster is making a completely unnecessary comment in order to play devil's advocate, when we all know universally that ending the drug war is an important step in the conflict against an organized crime unit which came to prominence because of said drug war.
The original statement was derisive without actually offering any useful criticism, and I called it out by taking it to its logical conclusion. If you want more thoughtful replies, it starts with your own comment.
I'm curious why growers feel it's still more advantageous to illegally grow? It must mean the risk/reward still dramatically favours illegal production. That's what needs to be addressed.
I think coffee/tobacco is probably a good example of what can be achieved with legalizing drugs. It might be the path to it is a bit slow as there's a transition, but I don't see why other drugs couldn't end up similarly to coffee.
Heck, you could argue it for everything even. Why do fruits and vegetables farms don't feel like going the illegal production route?
> Heck, you could argue it for everything even. Why do fruits and vegetables farms don't feel like going the illegal production route?
I’ve never illegally bought drugs but I know people that have. I would not be comfortable doing it, but plenty of people are. Drugs, especially legal ones, are expensive.
I’ve never illegally bought fruit and I do not know anyone who has. I don’t know anyone who would be comfortable doing it. Legal fruit is not expensive.
Or in other words, if we're saying it's because drugs are still too expensive and somehow illegal production can compete better on price, why is that?
Especially with weed, the process is so similar to any other commodity agricultural process.
> I would not be comfortable doing it, but plenty of people are
This seems transitory to me. If we take this separate to the price argument, I think it must be restricted to people that were already doing so prior to legal alternatives. Again, tossing the price factor out, I would suspect all new and future consumer would go to a legal source for purchase.
That said, the article talked about production, not wholesale. So it's not clear from the article that illegal sellers have risen, it's possible your street dealers have been impacted, but that legal vendors or byproduct makers are purchasing from the illegal supply chain still.
Cheap labor. Low threshold for consumers to pay a lot, potentially government subsidy.
Drugs have way higher testing requirements. In California cannabis has intense testing and labeling requirements. Fruit doesn’t seem to. Also taxes of course.
> would suspect all new and future consumer would go to a legal source for purchase.
Oh absolutely agree. I think there’s a cohort that would way the drugs but not be willing to engage in illegal activity.
Maintaining stores and supply chains and not a guy with a burner phone and a beat up Toyota driving to a parking lot probably raises costs too (compared to illegal drugs, not fruit obviously). Same at every step of supply chain. The costs are likely high for compliance etc.
True, but Mexico has been a major manufacturing hub for decades...its not like cartel violence has had any impact. Chances are your car, or lots of its components, were made in Mexico. Likewise for major appliances and textiles. XBoxes were manufactured there. I don't recall anyone pulling out because of cartel violence.
This feels like people saying not to build a factory in the US because of Proud Boys, Antifa and MS13.
Source? Maybe legal emigration increases, but I doubt that illegal or asylum-seeking emigration would increase. People are fleeing from the terrible conditions in their home countries.
This premise was discussed a few times prominently on HN, and it appears to be accurate. There is an initial surge in people leaving as a country climbs economically; then it tapers off and reverses after you get rich enough to support what I would guess is a broad middle class quality of life.
"New Research Confirms that Migration Rises as the Poorest Countries Get Richer"
"As GDP per capita rises, so do emigration rates. This relationship slows after roughly US$5,000, and reverses after roughly $10,000"
1. India is not alligned to any country. India cares about what it's best interest for its own people. If that means buying oil from Russia so be it.
2. Article 46 of Indian constitution -> "The State shall promote with special care the educational and economic interests of the weaker sections of the people, and, in particular, of the Scheduled Castes and the Sche- duled Tribes, and shall protect them from social injustice and all forms of exploitation."
3. The constitution itself of India was written by Ambedkar who himself is a dalit.
I applaud the Indian state. One of the worst things about the Ukraine-Russian Conflict is being made to pick a side. Kudos to India for masterfully navigating both sides.
We have seen no Western governments strongly criticize India for these oil purchases. The only criticisms have been from media outlets and mild criticisms when government officials are questioned by the media. But even those mild criticisms are usually caveated with something to the effect that this is not gonna affect relations with India.
The reason is simple. Western countries are privately thrilled with Indias arrangement. If India wasn’t buying Russian oil they would be buying it from the global market instead which would further push up oil prices and therefore inflation.
Even better, India is doing it at a massive discount ($35/barrel, I believe) which at current prices effectively translates to Russia selling oil to India at a loss.
Another interesting thing to note is that the $35/barrel discount India is getting, is functionally similar to the price cap idea that the European countries are trying to enact. In fact, I suspect it’s an even lower price than the cap they will settle on, and it remains to be seen if Europe can enact this price cap at all, something India has been doing successfully for the entirety of the war.
Agree for overall, but even if India bought oil for $35 discount, $88 (WTI) - $35 = $53, it seems to still profitable price. Also anyway there are fixed costs. So technically if everyone don't buy Russian oil, it's better for sanction but some people in developing country will die. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/business/international-b...
Don’t forget that it’s also far more expensive for Russia to send oil to India.
They don’t have oil pipelines to India. Their oil is being shipped to India, but their ports are all located on their Northern coast which means every round trip takes days and weeks longer than they used to when supplying the likes of Europe, which means they need more tankers to supply the same amount of oil to India than they would Europe.
Europe have been getting Russian oil, gas and other resources for trillions of USD for the last 20 years perfectly aware that the money was spent on corruption and military buildup. Moreover, Europe continues to do so even now. European companies even continued to send military equipment to Russia after the initial invasion in Ukraine in 2014.
I do not say that it makes India somehow right. But the scale of wrongs by Europe is so big that any benefits India is trying to get are minuscule .
The EU is voluntarily cutting off purchasing Russian oil - which is what the parent comment referred to - and has placed an embargo on Russian oil.
The EU is taking enormous harm upon itself by what it's doing in regards to the Ukraine / Russia war. It could stay out of the Ukraine conflict, it could have the pipelines all operating normally, it could be enjoying dramatically lower energy bills.
India is doing the exact opposite. They're intentionally avoiding harming themselves and are opportunistically buying cheap energy.
Yes, they're behaving very differently. Which also doesn't mean it's not in India's self-interest to purchase cheap energy, given their economic context. One would be a fool to not grasp why they're doing it and that for their own well-being it may very well make sense; they're not part of Europe and they don't view themselves as being involved.
Oil is a global market. India buying Russian oil means they aren’t buying it from the broader market. If they didn’t buy Russian oil they would buy it from the broader market increasing overall oil prices and inflation in Europe.
More importantly, India is buying oil at a heavily discounted price, which at current prices means Russia is likely selling at a loss. This is working so well that Europe is trying to emulate something similar with their price cap idea, which is functionally similar to what India is doing, except India’s discount probably means an even lower price for Russia and India has been doing this successfully for 200+ days while it’s not clear Europe’s price cap idea will ever get off the ground.
India’s GDP per capita is a bit over $2000. The EU GDP per capita is about $40k.
I completely understand them buying energy from wherever it’s cheapest. Industrialization of India decreases real poverty, and an increase in prices would hit them hard. Asking them to stop buying fuel is like asking a homeless person for food. And doesn’t the EU continue to purchase Russian gas?
Unfortunately diplomacy is a balancing act. India, I assume keeps a higher priority on making sure its poorest don't go under in this ongoing energy crisis. They have 1.4B mouths to feed & not exactly rich. Plus its not their fight, and if they don't want to join a security quorum against a third country, its their choice.
Well, it's not indirect. It's quite direct. India has fossil fuel deals with Russia and gets most of its weapons from Russia. America armed wars against India in the past and continues to be the largest source of military aid for India's regional enemy Pakistan. Indian-American relations have become quite good in recent times but geopolitics isn't a schoolyard my side v your side thing. You just manage the amount to which people will align with one or the other on a specific issue.
> India cares about what it's best interest for its own people. If that means buying oil from Russia so be it.
So should we. Too often we help countries that then turn their backs on us because they “care about whats best for their people”. Arent we allowed to do the same? Why such a negative reaction when we even suggest the prospect of doing so.
> most important their treatment of the dalit and lower castes.
Dalit are people from lower caste. Also, Indians have been actively engaged in removing the caste-based discrimination for decades now. It will take time. Do you know that at least 50% of all the jobs in the government sector are reserved from people in the lower caste? The same applied to college education as well. This percentage may be higher in some Indian states. Show me another country that has taken such drastic steps to correct historical wrongs.
The US Civil War war never achieved its stated aims for black / previously-ensalved people. Even though the North won the US Civil War, because of Andrew Johnson (edit: not Jackson) and the ultra-conservative SCOTUS, the people of the US South were able to put into effect Jim Crow laws, and the South essentially won the war over whether non-white people should be treated as equal citizens – there's a book on this subject: https://www.amazon.ca/How-South-Won-Civil-War/dp/0190900903
There’s a gap between ‘did not achieve its stated aims’ and ‘did not win any actual rights’ that is big enough to drive a truck through…
Also, Andrew Jackson wasn’t a very nice guy, but he’d been dead for 28 years when the Civil War ended. Can’t really blame him for how things worked out at that point.
>My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that
He saved the Union so he accomplished his goal for the war.
Sorry, I meant Andrew Johnson. He kept vetoing progressive bills, opposed the 14th amendment, etc.
Rutherford B. Hayes was horrible too, since he was the one who pulled federal troops out of the South (who were there to protect non-white people's voting rights).
Honestly, the Southern states should never have been admitted back into the Union _as states_, but should rather have been annexed back as territories (with no federal representation). Abolitionists admitted those states back under the theory that blacks voting would result in progressive folks being elected.
But we're still paying the price of that foresight today. If the southern states were territories, Trump & Bush would never have won, the Congress would have been a highly-progressive for the past two decades, etc. Honestly, even today it might be an improvement if these southern states just formed their own country, but with a free-trade and currency-sharing treaty with the rest of the US.
The issues are the electoral college, two senators per state regardless of population and gerrymandering. If we truly had “one person one vote”, most of these problems would be solved
1) multiple member constituencies for minority districts might actually solve a lot of problems
2) there is an section in the 14th amendment which allows states’ electoral votes and their Congressional representation to be zeroed out if they don’t play nice (basically the same as territories)
The amendment says: “the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State.”
Not zero out, but rather reduce.
Regardless, the conservative SCOTUS would never enforce this anyways.
Yes, and you can consider steps taken by India to have had equal amount of impact if not more in the betterment of oppressed. It may not have been a Big Bang improvement like with American civil war but instead slowly over a few decades it has worked quite well
India caste-based discrimination is as strong as before. All this jobs reservations are created by politicians who want to get the votes of the lower caste but this is just a show. The real test of the pudding is that the dalits fare better when the British was running the show.
I'm not sure about the last sentence. India had a literacy rate of 16% when the British left and education was monopolized by non-Dalits/SC/STs AFAIK. Do you have numbers?
Violence against the dalits is much worst than when the British was running the show. At least during the Raj times, a dalit can reasonably count on the British to deliver justice when the higher caste rape or kill their family members. Nowadays if a dalit dare to speak up or go to a police more violence will descend upon them. Passing a law here or there for show or having a tribal as president is nothing when the culture is caste ridden. You can't legislate morality is what I am saying.
I avoid speaking here since this is an American website and I don't expect them to be educated about non American things. But you are just making shit up and I would like to know your motives behind it.
The leaps and bounds of improvement in lives of lower caste people is one of the primary reason why casteism is not going away. Unlike racism, anyone can claim to be of any caste and there is literal riots happening to be classified as lower caste so that people can claim the benefit. As I said, I don't plan to start an argument here but you are lying and you should tell us why.
India's HDI (Human Development Index) is worse than half of sub-Sahara African countries. Who bear the brunt of this dire statistics? The higher caste or the dalits and the adivasis? India should spend money on this vulnerable people but the Modi government is talking of spending money to dress up the capital or other vanity projects. When confront Indian will readily cite they have a dalit president or this or that to address Western sensibilities but the ground reality is that Indian's caste culture hasn't changed. And that is the problem.
India is more of an ally to the US than Russia. The prime minister openly asked for the war to stop, which is hardly a show of support.
I don't see how you can complain about environmental impact when the average Apple user in the US probabaly has an order of magnitude higher impact on the environment than the average Indian.
Russia’s ally is a stretch. It wouldn’t go to war against the west with Russia. Russia is a resource rich nation, and India needs resource. That’s it. The cheap military hardware helps too.
The EU was also financing a war against a European country until about a month ago. At the tune of around 400 million EUR a week (correct me if wrong) in gas it purchased from Russia.
Germany was under a lot of pressure to end its reliance on russian gas and got a lot of flack for having allowed such high dependency. Its also a supplier of weapons and financial aid as well as a member of nato. As you can see even between allies there is a lot of critique. I suppose the question is, what is _your_ point?
I think the point is that's a little bit more complicated than you make it out to be. The USA is also "supporting the war effort" by buying fertilizer, etc from them.
India is a major US military equipment importer today by slowly pivoting from USSR tech & also a significant business partner to the US. Many multiples higher than its trade with Russia. Thats real $. We could similarly argue India is supporting the US efforts by supporting its revenue.
That's a bit uncharitable view considering Russia was getting $1B+ from EU block for gas via Nord Stream 1 every single week until very recently. Indian imports pale in that comparison, being a tiny fraction of that amount.
If you're gonna point fingers at least lets do it with the facts being straight.
Truthfully, diplomatic relationship isn't a black & white, zero-sum kind of game. The fact that US policies change so erratically gives a lot of countries low confidence from going all-in. The stake is population of 1.4B & a mostly modest per capita income. When you got mouths to feed, war in a distant land makes less sense.
> India is russia’a ally and we shouldn't depend on it either.
This statement lacks nuance regarding the dynamics of the region. India has to negotiate with China, Pakistan, Russia, EU, US and others. India tries to balance the situation as best they know how, and each party doesn’t always get everything they want.
Recently India had China right on their doorstep/border and I expect it put a bit of strain on the India-Russia relations due to the ties between Russia and China. It looks like that situation has cooled down some, which is positive.
I’d prefer the US engage with India in a way that strengthens our shared values and our trading interests.
holy crap dude. read a book or something about India. India has class related problems because of economic disparity and caste (in ALL religions) does play a role but not central to it. It is akin to racism problem in USA, outlawed but will take some time to fully go away. Do not confuse it with dalit oppression. Dalits are as ministers in democratic process, film stars, athletes, in military and top institutes. What are your news sources about India ? I am worried you are being misled by agenda based reporting. Block NYT and WaPo posting on India right away for a better understanding of the country.
This statement makes no sense. You're putting out political opinions on the lives of people without any idea of the reality.
The caste system was a part of India but every Government since independence has made attempts and continues to make everything possible to make the lives of the historically lower castes better off.
Not to mention India was forced to become a USSR ally because the USA had sent their aircraft carrier in a India Pakistan war to support the Pakistan side. And then the USSR sent their aircraft carrier in India's defence.
India’s geopolitical focus was Pakistan. In that, Russia was a good ally. As that shifts towards Beijing, Moscow becomes one of the worst possible defence partners.
India does business with Russia that does not mean they are allied. Allied means India would be participating in the Ukraine conflict like Bulgaria.
But I get what you mean, they have similar relationships with China and the US as well, they are a sovreim nation that do what they think is best for their people.
India is not Russia's ally, it is also not Russia's foe. They are aligned with each other on some issues (like Pakistan), disagree on other things, like the war in Ukraine.
Apple should move from US?
As if US doesn’t countries like Dubai, and Israel which promote active killing of innocent journalists.
Has many of its states controlling womens rights?
Bailouts and supports companies like Exonn or BP that caused severe disasters?
My reading of the situation is that India is not necessarily pro-Russia, instead its position on Russia vs the West and Russia vs Ukraine is to quote Trump "very fine people on both sides" which may be problematic in of itself but is less red-flaggy than "pro-Russia".
Thank you. I have precisely zero negative feelings towards indians. Incidentally in a previous comment i criticised what i perceive as wests’ declining freedoms. We should he allowed to discuss such topics without being slandered as racist.
Calling out societal problems is not racism, but using that pretext to undermine a whole country when you don't even have a tiny bit of idea on what the ground situation is, it's definitely racist.
It would have been racist if i said anything about indians. But i appreciate the attempt at projecting racism on me instead of focusing on india’s racism towards the lower castes. I wouldnt in good faith and conscience buy a product made by exploiting those people. Countries can be criticised, nothing racist in that.
That's the whole point, we're not okay consuming products made by these types of countries, that's why there is an effort to move production elsewhere. This thread is discussing why the alternative may be better but not good overall.
Your racism shows in your tone deaf comments.
Give me a first world country name, and I will give you links to the same behaviour of the said country vs India.
I totally get that but what I don't understand is why they'd shift it to India instead of the USA or somewhere closer. This might create the same problem a few years from now.
My guess would be to get around Indian import bans on products made outside of India. India has traditionally been very protectionist.
It's a large population and growing in affluence. So potentially a big new market for Apple.
Manufacturing in India would allow them to be seen as a "home choice" there and also provide Apple with a chance to hedge future sanctions on products made in China in other export markets.
They can also placate CCP concerns by telling them that they are only manufacturing in India to access that otherwise inaccessible market.
At some level, slave labor or literally wage slavery is necessary to make the things most of us enjoy. It’s not just the low pay that’s the issue though. Big companies need to be able to dump production waste somewhere otherwise costs increase.
An Apple product that was truly, 100% made in the USA from parts that are also 100% made in the USA would be extremely expensive. The Librem 5 USA is about as close as you can get at $2000 for a phone with pretty anemic specs; and many individual parts and raw materials still come from abroad.
It's not like Apple can compel anyone to work for them - they must offer competitive pay to attract workers. By definition, the people in India taking jobs at Apple are doing so because it's the best option available to them. The reality is that foreign industry factory jobs are generally considered quite desirable and high-paying in these countries. This "slave labor" is, in fact, one of the primary mechanisms by which living standards in developing countries are elevated over time.
You may (understandably) feel bad about enjoying a product made by someone getting nominally paid orders of magnitude less than you. But naively arguing that Apple should be mandated to pay more (or even be forced to produce in the US) does the opposite of help the people you claim to be worried about.
I don't feel bad at all. I'm just saying, that's the way it is. I'm not arguing for Apple to be paying more. What I am calling "slavery" for lack of a better word, in whatever form it may take, is a key component of capitalism. I'm just saying that no one really wants something made 100% in the USA because very few people could afford it.
You are 100% right in that this is the primary mechanism for increasing the standard of living around the world. It's worked so well in fact that the wages in China are not nearly as low as they once were. I would say that low wages alone are no longer the primary benefit of having something made in China. It's much more the scale and loose environmental regulations that are valuable now. There are quite a few things that you use every day which are almost exclusively made in China or India or similar.
I think people in general do not realize just how much we rely on China and Chinese manufacturing, and how beneficial it is for everyone to have things made abroad. People focus on the higher end factory items like iPhone assembly but don't often think about all the sub-components. Base materials like adhesive, spray on preservatives, plastic containers, labels, etc. are almost all made in China or somewhere with loose environmental regulations. There are so many items that go into day-to-day items that are either made in China or made from products imported from China. If it's made from plastic or for plastic, and it's made at scale, there is a really good chance it's made in China.
> What I am calling "slavery" for lack of a better word
I would object to calling a mutually beneficial arrangement "slavery", but whatever.
> I'm just saying that no one really wants something made 100% in the USA because very few people could afford it
While this is true, it invites reasonable-sounding criticism to the effect of "well if you can't make your cheap toys without exploiting people then maybe you shouldn't have it at all" and so misses the most crucial point. Forcing something to be made 100% in the USA is bad for _everyone_. It doesn't empower workers at the cost of the rich or empower Indians at the cost of Americans. It simply satisfies some misguided and/or nationalistic sentiment while leaving everyone worse off for it.
> I would say that low wages alone are no longer the primary benefit of having something made in China. It's much more the scale and loose environmental regulations that are valuable now.
While yes, a huge component is the vast amount of manufacturing expertise and capital that has been built up in China. It may have started as a country from which you bought cheap junk manufactured for low wages, sure. But after decades of that unsavory and seemingly exploitative relationship, China is now home to lots of advanced, high quality manufacturing with skilled and productive workers that can demand better pay than ever before.
In a funny sense, it reminds me of that quote about how "the capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them". At no point did any of the foreign industries investing in China have any intention more noble than "exploiting" cheap, undifferentiated labor from a developing country. Yet that very behavior has apparently driven wages so high that companies are willing to spend billions to start the process all over again in another country.
> At some level, slave labor or literally wage slavery is necessary to make the things most of us enjoy.
I'm not sure how true this is. I mean, today it is, because we don't have any production capacity to build those misc parts. Apple can't just say 'i want everything made in the USA from USA made parts', because it would be literally impossible to do so. You have a few small outlets you could probably source, but not enough for a mass market device.
That said, -if- we could get there, I'm not convinced it would be all that much more expensive to the end user just due to the massive scale of everything. How much more? Who knows, but even if we say something rather high like $200 per unit, it's not much when you're spending $1200 already. I get most people would take the cheaper option, but a company with Apple's clout and fan base may be the one company to actually effect change, if they wanted to.
Apple suppliers already have infrastructure in place to assemble iPhones in India (and Brazil?) so it makes sense to boost that capacity. Lower hanging fruit.
Not sure what you mean. All the current data is painting the picture of companies and factories fleeing China, and moving to US (reshoring, close parity in cost to China in certain states, clean energy act), Mexico (friendshoring, close to consumer), Vietnam (fastest growing, most relocations), India (alternative to Vietnam, huge labor force), Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines, Eastern Europe...the list goes on and on.
A complex cutting edge product has many "one basket" items that have no ready substitutes. For a company with Apple's buying power, that is often the opportunity to demand an exclusive from the supplier. Cuts both ways, at least for Apple and other 1st tier OEMs.
India's demographic outlook is far better than China's for the next two decades. I expect Apple is anticipating the resultant societal disruption and is trying to get out ahead of it.
Indian demographics is FAR worse than China's going forward. Her demographic divident is mostly done / wasted - the few affluent and educated states are aging out, massively overpopulated, under-educated and poor states are younger but have little prospects with atrocious labour particapation rate. That's a far bigger recipe for disaster than PRC who at ~5x per capita wealth and massive savings rate to manage demographic transition.
Reality is, India demographics is less blessing and more curse, she has to tackle a far larger overpopulation crisis with fewer resources and opportunities. Her economic growth / ability to generate new jobs has rarely kept up with population growth, and with automation, offshoring spreading out to smaller countries, there won't be same amount of manufacturing jobs to elevate India as it did PRC. India looks to be destined to get old while staying lower middle-income VS PRC who will at least enter high income. And once the old start dying in PRC , there will be huge amounts of generational wealth transfers that analysts predict will increase / sustain highend consumption. What Apple is really anticipating is being squeezed out due to geopolitics and rise in domestic PRC luxury brands.
That said, still India has 1.4B people and aggressive tariff policies to encourage local assembly / sales, but in terms of market power, there will be more high income PRC nationals vs Indians for Apple tax tier products, and that won't meaningfully converge unless India goes all in on income disparity.
Until very recently non-humans were often referred to, in English, with gendered pronouns. This persists in English speaking countries and cultures other than US/UK.
Countries have, historically, been identified as women not just in the written word but also in illustration, poetry, etc. The OP's relationship to his country is entirely on his terms not yours.
Furthermore the role of pronouns are not to refer to people, but generally to refer to nouns. In some cultures it is considered rude to refer to a person as a pronoun. So OP shouldn't be using "India" repetitively (which would tire the reader/listener). One can use "it" to refer to "India", OP will prefers to refer to India as a "she"
Some may find this backwards, or misogynistic. That's their problem.
In languages with gendered nouns, countries, cars, boats, and houses are almost always female because they contain humans (and females have a womb).
English doesn't have gendered nouns, but this linguistic quirk runs deep enough in human psychology that we do sometimes use female pronouns to describe these things. Examples: "She's a beauty" (of a car), or "America and her allies."
"because they contain humans (and females have a womb)."
While I like the theory, its cute, I dont know that that's true. L'automobile is male in Italian and Spanish. And its easy for a native speaker in either language to come up with numerous examples.
In fact gender really is just grammar. We shouldn't see much into it trying to project ourselves into it. Otherwise, why can the same object have different genders through synonyms? Again:
La macchina
L'automobile.
La yerba (granted in Spanish its lost its meaning as grass)
El cesped
La nave
Il barco
La embarcación
El bote
Or changes from the addition of a mere diminutive:
Il banco
La bancarella
Il barco
La barchetta
Gender is just a classification, largely binary (although Spanish retains the neuter) that got the unfortunate sexual labels of male and female
This sounds interesting but I don't think it holds true?
Going by the languages I have some knowledge of, that doesn't hold true for Portuguese, where the word "country" itself is masculine but the truth is different countries have different genders. I guess it would be the same for other latin languages? (at least for Spanish). German is also the same but the word "country" is neutral.
I guess it does somewhat hold true for my native language, Hebrew, where all the words you specified but "house" are feminine. So I guess it might also hold true for Arabic then?
That makes sense, except for the fact that in English, gendering inanimate objects is nearly always female. If you have a busted computer, you might say "I'm gonna resolder this pad and then she'll run just fine" but you'd almost never say "I'm gonna reseat this connector and then he'll boot up".
I think gendering a country is something that's done specifically if you're relatively native in English.
To me it's the kind of thing I'd expect to hear from my grandparents. It's weird and old-fashioned. Even most news sources use the genderless "it" for countries nowadays.
Countries are occasionally associated with genders even in English (mother/father land etc). India is commonly referred to as her. Quick research into why:
>Bhārat Mātā ( Mother India in English) is a national personification of India (Bharat) as a mother goddess.
I don't know how valid, TBH I use pronouns because it's rhetorically tedious to keep typing country name.
But you don't have to. "it" is considered impolite, something you don't use for something you treasure. Furthermore English has a perfectly long history of referring to countries as shes. This has fallen in disuse in the past 50 years as we've gotten fussy about the sexes. But it is certainly not incorrect or foreign to English.
China's issue is that people who are too old to be productive still need to be fed, clothed, housed, doctored. An inverted population pyramid is not a good thing, no matter what the resource situation is.
Well, they had a unique one-child policy for over three decades, and are only now starting to feel the ramifications.
In China, the children are expected to take care of their parents in their twilight years, and the husband is typically expected to provide for the wife and kid(s), so you basically have 1 dude providing for 8 people: himself + his wife + 2 kids + his parents + his wife's parents.
Any way you cut it, China is due for ~35 years of an absolutely horrendous labor participation rate. And unlike developed nations with declining birthrates, it's unlikely immigrants will be able to take up the slack, as extreme xenophobia is omnipresent in China and her population is absolutely massive.
To be fair to the post you're replying to China's demographic issues are more pronounced and likely to occur much sooner than most other large economies. The biggest issue being that they have never normalized immigration when they needed to like many western economies started to do in the 70s.
No, it's an issue in many countries. You will note, however, that this post regards China and India, and my comment was a comparison between the two. Pay attention.
China has been below 2.2 in 1990 and has remained well below that since, while continuing to have a growing population. If you're looking even three or four decades ahead it's not a huge problem for India.
The world's population's fertility is falling and will probably go bellow replacement soon.
That takes care of the resource problem.
So if one subset has a large fertility they eventually inherit the Earth since the neighboring countries will be empty, or will have changed their fertility course.
China's population in the 1980 was poor but was much better educated than most countries at the same GDP level.
And a larger part of the population got basic education. This is important when you have to read instructions.
(meanwhile India's literacy rate is at the level of a middle of pack African country)
>China's forays on the world stage are because of money and its increasingly wealthy, educated population.
Deng Xiaoping started Chinese economic reform. You might want to check out China before Deng. its a poorly educated and financially constrained country.
Do you need an educated labor force to assemble iPhone?
It feels like I've been finding a lot more products showing up with Made in India tags on them. Sheets, hand tools, car tools, clothing. Pretty good stuff.
They still do! My wife and I go often and much of their linens, small decorations are Indian and well priced (even relative to their Indian local market prices for some products)
The skeptic in me wonders to what extent this is due to strengthening of labour laws in China; if India's labor laws are relatively weaker, and it provides better optics (a "democracy"!) then that might explain Apple's move?
I don't know enough about the situation, but this is just a thought that comes to mind.
Nothing of the sort; it's due to the worsening condition to run a business in China, namely the abrupt shutdown of electricity to factories, abrupt covid shutdown of factories and loss of output while still needing to pay out wages, and worsening economic conditions. you can see some of that in this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPptD2eBgwo. In this video, a factory owner complains of an abrupt and unannounced electricity halt leading to machinery stopping in mid operation, and another factory owner crying that she has paid out 1M in wages after having to take a 3M loan out, and having so much unsold inventory.
Eh. You can’t really say that because those (electricity and Covid shut downs) are short term disruptions. Apple is not moving suppliers on short term disruptions.
I don't think that's being overly skeptical. It's been known that as labor prices increase, companies move factories to cheaper locations. Seam-sealed technical jackets used to be made in China, but now they're made in Vietnam. If prices in Vietnam rise to a certain point, companies will look at less developed countries.
But to ktta's point, another reason Apple did this was to minimize the Indian tariffs.
India’s labor laws are actually a massive deterrent to most large scale manufacturing.
One of the perils of a democratic setup is that people are free to assemble themselves into labor unions. India has a strong culture of labor organization which often stops reforms and investment.
I’m personally on the fence about this. Its easy to demonize labor unions when you’re outside that particular labor force, but my family has witnessed the importance of labor organization first hand, and I understand how crucial they can be to prop up labor interests.
The most robust part of India's "democracy" is its voting system which is among the most accessible in the world and is likely one of the best in the world.
By all other metrics and measures, India is a feudal state where laws are great on paper but terrible otherwise. People should - rightfully so - be wary of labelling India a democracy.
That's the assessment of an NGO, which may have some merit to it, and maybe not.
To quote the same article,
> Prof Mukherjee says most non-academics would be incredulous that a handful of research assistants and country experts get to decide that a country is an "electoral autocracy" while hundreds of millions of that country's citizens would disagree.
> "So really this is an instance of academic discourse and concepts operating at a considerable distance from lived experience. The operational concepts across the two domains are very different."
but they are elected and can be replaced. You can see people using their rights to replace government (both national and state). Also reduce or increase their mandate over the years.
No country is a true democracy nor just that. Every country claiming democracy it an amalgamation of various ideas mixed in varying percentage.
India is a parliamentary democratic secular republic with socialism also thrown in. Most of these ideas are overlapping but also has slighly differing paths.
It is difficult to even agree on one precise definition on what each of these are without a debate ensuing.
I rather be dependent on a democracy than a totalitarian state so a great first move. Now move some production to Europe and the us and we are talking.
It’s hard to see how much Índia will remain a democracy and it does have its problems. But certainly it seems far less of a revisionist power than China.
Treading on slippery slope are we. You talk about democracy but the USA itself is a two party democracy not a true democracy at heart. In India you can start your own political party and contest in elections. Since it got independence from the Britishers, India has stayed a democracy and will hopefully remain so. (Unless maybe CIA organises a coup d'état)
For example, many states have proposition systems which is a direct democracy: the residents can vote directly on laws themselves. There's good and bad things about this, but overall I think it's good - it's a way around a state legislature trying to do wildly unpopular things.
India is a democratic republic. Says so in the preamble of our constitution. It is a parliamentary democracy. We directly vote for the representatives in our local municipalities/corporations, state legislatures and central (federal) legislature.
When you vote directly, you risk voting for an authoritarian whom you can never recall in case he doesn't work in your interest or turns into a Dictator. In a representative democracy, the representatives are more approachable to the Citizens. This allows one to hold the representative accountable in case the Leader turns autocratic/dictatorial. Citizens can build pressure on Representatives from their own area rather than trying to galvanize a nation-wide agitation against a Dictator. And with a billion+ people voting, there is no way to reasonably expect to hold a single Leader accountable.
Direct Democracy doesn't work if the population is too big. Anything greater than a few thousand people you will need Representative Democracy.
So when one says "True Democracy" it invariably points to Representative Democracy with a Multi-Party system. Direct Democracy is a dead idea from the get go.
You mean the current right wing ruling party? It has a very large vocal, visible and genuine support from large population of India. That is democracy by any definition. This support is for progressive policies and anti-corruption principles.
Not all section of population agree on progress at the cost of right wing philosophies, but that again is in line with the rules of democracy.
Democracy and authoritarianism are not mutually exclusive. I think most people's gripes aren't with their political leanings, but the way they chose to respond to things like the Farmer Protest (where Modi's administration basically admitted they were wrong). Stifling communication and censoring the internet isn't what any just democratic ruler does, regardless of their party affiliation.
Stifling communication and censoring the internet happens in Kashmir, where 6 decades of cross border terrorism by Pakistan have made security situations a hell to maintain. The USA tacitly supports Pakistan and looks the other way when its funds are used for terrorism.
When you have a large part of population as riot hungry foreign funded troublemakers, to maintain peace, cutting off the internet in times of escalating situations is necessary evil.
> where Modi's administration basically admitted they were wrong
It is not at all an admission of wrong but a forced retraction due to circumstances. The Farm laws were actually extremely progressive of all laws passed by the Government. The issue was more to do with raising the spectre of the dead Khalistani movement and Terrorism spillover that India had to deal with in the 80s and 90s. India cannot afford a weak border with Pakistan at this juncture and with Punjab (border state) being the epicenter of protests did not make things any better. Repealing the Farm laws took India's agriculture backward by at least 2 decades [1] and [2] as the protests were orchestrated by wealthy farmers of Punjab, Haryana and to some extent UP. They are not representative of farmers across India, who are so poor that they could never have had the ability to organize large scale counter-protests. The consequence of repealing the farm laws have hurt the poor farmers whose grievances have gone completely unheard.
> Stifling communication and censoring the internet isn't what any just democratic ruler does, regardless of their party affiliation.
Isn't this exactly what Trudeau did when Farmers protested in Canada? By freezing their bank accounts and censoring channels that supported the protests? I have seen this exact thing done in multiple first-world "Democratic" countries with no one calling them out. Feels like "Democracy for thee — but not for me".
I’ve heard mixed things from Indians. I suppose the question might *not* be how much it remains a democracy - you are correct that the ruling party appears to have wide popular support - but how limited some freedoms might be for non Hindus.
> You mean the current right wing ruling party? It has a very large vocal, visible and genuine support from large population of India... This support is for progressive policies and anti-corruption principles.
It is vile, divisive, and hate-filled politics that the masses have turned to.
Just the other day indians were blaming their pollution on the west because we moved manufacturing to that country and china. I fail to understand why we would want to continue outsourcing to india all things considered.
> Just the other day indians were blaming their pollution on the west because we moved manufacturing to that country and china
Well isn't it true ? You act like people are lying when they say the west pays countries to take off their garbage and dump it in their own nation. With all the things that USA imports from other countries as manufacturing it inside the US will decrease their profits. Classic Murica, offshore all the dirty work to the east, blame India and China for rising pollution when the final product is ironically coming back to USA and pat itself on the back for cutting down carbon emissions.
If you pay someone to dispose of waste and they just dump it in the ocean and pocket the money, what do you call that? They can just refuse to accept the deal or charge enough for it to be feasible to dispose of it sustainably.
Does India have a vocational training and education system like China and Germany?
You can't build a modern factory with just college-educated engineers and no-skill workers with only primary education. You need skilled workers who have been trained as technicians, PLC programmers, CNC operators etc.
I wonder whether this will improve the manufacturing defects[1] present on all of the 5 pairs of AirPods I've purchased so far, and every other person's AirPods I've seen. You'd figure they could have robots epoxy the pieces together accurately.
Ugh, my first pair was defective and I managed to get them replaced under warranty at the last moment. I felt super fortunate, but the replacements (now out of warranty) are having different issues. They’re more functional which is nice I guess, but still very obnoxious.
It’s a shame because when they work well, I love them. By far the best earbuds I’ve ever owned — when they work.
Keen observers of Chinese industry will note that there is also a significant threat of IP theft[1] to Apple by continuing to invest in advanced manufacturing over the long term in China.
Apple hasn't just outsourced manufacturing to China. They are on the cutting edge of many-a-technology , at least commercially available tech, and they ship enormous amounts of know-how.
Combine this with the Chinese Communist Party's aims to extend industry as an arm of state policy with the likes of Huawei getting into telecommunications and IT hardware, it's hard to see a future for Apple not getting overwhelmed by the competitive threat of a lower cost adversary.
Some assembly may shift to India but the manufacture of the key components sure as isn't, correct? You've just shifted a part of the chain, not one of the critical steps upstream of it.
The US government can't ban Chinese manufacturing/assembly, in the short term, without completely destroying the US economy.
My naive assumption is that manufacturers will reduce rusk in fear of the reverse: China putting up restrictions, requirements, and supporting straight up takeovers (ARM China).
Zero COVID has shown that China can lock down the world’s largest container port and without batting an eye. More importantly, there is no end to that policy in the foreseeable future.
I gotta say as a native Chinese myself, I’m super supportive of business moving production away from China. CCP and brainwashed Chinese folks need to realize they can’t do whatever da faq they want just because they have cheap labor as leverage!
But as Steven P. Jobs of Apple spoke, President Obama interrupted with an inquiry of his own: what would it take to make iPhones in the United States?
Not long ago, Apple boasted that its products were made in America. Today, few are. Almost all of the 70 million iPhones, 30 million iPads and 59 million other products Apple sold last year were manufactured overseas.
Why can’t that work come home? Mr. Obama asked.
Mr. Jobs’s reply was unambiguous. “Those jobs aren’t coming back,” he said, according to another dinner guest.
I mean, this is a company which stoves way money in tax havens. Apple may be incorporated in the US, but it is pretty much a global company. If the US decides to clamp down on free-wheeling capitalists taking advantage of globalism, sure, but until then, it is a fool's errand to presume a business of such scale is going to leave profits on the table because nationalism.
Numbers don't add up. There is a reason you have to pay 200K to great engineers in USA vs say 80-k100K in India (which is like the top 1% of salary there and only the best get it). So yea, it is Capitalism 101.
People focus on the trade war and covid lockdowns, and those are real issues.
However, what people need to realize is that China is not an inexpensive place to do business anymore. The standard of living has gone up dramatically, people demand higher salaries, etc.
Apple should shift its production line to Vietnam instead. Vietnam is close to the supply chain, has better logistic infrastructure and its workforce is much more productive than India.
No one's saying they won't. ASEAN and South Asia are both credible destinations. What works in India's favour, I'd reckon, is the abundance of human capital.
I have been hearing this for many years that India has abundance of human capital but reality paints a different picture. Fact is many Western companies that have set up manufacturing shop in India eventually moved out because it was losing money. Ford is a good example.
Ford was not competitive in the Indian market. It simply failed. Are you surprised? Doesn't the US ban the importation of any car model newer than 22 years (may be misremembering this figure), thus ensuring the dominance of mediocre products in the American market?
Having the largest American company entirely dependent on China is definitely not a good thing, given current tensions.
[1] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-09-30/apple-s-t...