In my dad’s lifetime we went from fighting a bitter war with Vietnam to building our most popular consumer electronics there. I wonder what we will build in Afghanistan in my retirement years.
For previous generations, you could say much the same thing about Germany and the engineering and automotive sectors. Afghanistan is an inhospitable place that doesn't have inherent qualities such as a skilled population, high population density, logistics channels, shipping ports, or a geography amenable to developing the above. They could become a major minerals exporter (there's believed to be a lot of lithium in…
Vietnam to make Apple Watch and MacBook
351–360 of 598 posts
Re: Vietnam to make Apple Watch and MacBook
#352Re: Vietnam to make Apple Watch and MacBook
#353Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be clear, I'm very much a layperson with absolutely no special knowledge or insight. I really don't know enough about Iraq to have an opinion. But what I do notice is that Germany, Japan, Korea and Vietnam were all able to break free from feelings of anger and grievance against past enemies. Iraq (and Afghanistan) are populations rife with religion-fuelled and religion-adjacent grievances, pointing internally and…
Iraq and Iran have massive domestic economies, and established tertiary education. I have no reason to believe graduates from Iraqi uni are any less capable than the Iranians who work with me, or who I know work in Engineering and Health fields all over Australia. There are good AF graduates too, but fewer. They have less resources to fund tertiary education.
As I said before, I know very little about Iraq.
Re: Vietnam to make Apple Watch and MacBook
#354Earlier quoted context omitted.
No it isn't. People with nothing to lose and living in poverty while seeing their democratic neighbors prospering are harder to control. People with education, jobs, and families - something to lose - are easier to control. How many Tienanmen Squares has China had since Asian and Western democracies opened their markets and enriched China.
Tiananmen protesters were mostly students, young people with a lot of prospects in life, usually from a better-off families who could afford to send children to a university (instead of having them work and keep up the family). They definitely had much more to lose than Marx's lumpen proletariat. Of course, now people in China, especially in the rich coastal cities, have dramatically more to lose. They've been shown…
Aka nothing to lose. Having family and job would be considered having things to lose. Also let’s not consider students “educated”, they will be if they then build a career and actually practice their knowledge. Any clown can get a degree.
Re: Vietnam to make Apple Watch and MacBook
#355Earlier quoted context omitted.
Iraq and Iran have massive domestic economies, and established tertiary education. I have no reason to believe graduates from Iraqi uni are any less capable than the Iranians who work with me, or who I know work in Engineering and Health fields all over Australia. There are good AF graduates too, but fewer. They have less resources to fund tertiary education.
Iran is very much a different story. Grievance is largely held by the ruling classes and not the broader population. With the right leadership in place I could totally imagine a future where Iran is a trusted/respected member of the international community and a strong global trade partner. As I said before, I know very little about Iraq.
Re: Vietnam to make Apple Watch and MacBook
#356Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But now we can't build anything and if china embargoes us, we're doomed. Firstly there is vastly more manufacturing in the US, Canada, and Mexico than you appear to realize. Secondly China is far more prone to being embargoed than the United States. If China cut us off then the price of certain goods would increase significantly and there’d be shortages of some goods and industrial inputs but we could feed ourselve…
>prone to being embargoed Most US / global industries wouldn't be going anywhere without PRC supply chains / rare earth processing. Besides PRC is calorie self-sufficient and produces enough raw resources domestically for war economy, and export to west is like... 5% of GDP total, i.e. trivial in total war scenario. Now go look up how much steel, oil and other primary inputs PRC generates domestically... it wouldn't…
Re: Vietnam to make Apple Watch and MacBook
#357Earlier quoted context omitted.
If AF was smart, they'd partner with battery makers to value add instead of just shipping lithium out as-is. Better to build value. And, many dry inhospitable places are productive in the right terms, if you understand them. Look at the bone yards: Making good money, letting birds park there.
So, couple things you should know about the Taliban…
Re: Vietnam to make Apple Watch and MacBook
#358Earlier quoted context omitted.
99% chance the people complaining about labor conditions are doing so on a made in China phone. Let’s be honest, people complaining about labor conditions have a pretty weak understanding of economics and what is actually going on with regards to these factories. China isn’t stupid. They weaken their currency specifically to bring in the cheap labor jobs to lift the poorest to a slightly less poor tier. Unless you re…
> 99% chance the people complaining about labor conditions are doing so on a made in China phone. 99% of everyone has a phone made in China, does this mean it's not possible to complain about the state of the world we live in?
Re: Vietnam to make Apple Watch and MacBook
#359Earlier quoted context omitted.
> years ago No longer the case obviously but more importantly, Apple studied themselves and found they were only saving 10% in costs? This makes no sense lol
10% is many billions every three months. I don't think it's wise or ethical to manufacture in countries that have human rights violations but there's nothing ethical about a corporation.
(The US, like China, also runs concentration camps. As far as I can tell there is no country on Earth that uniformly preserves human rights.)
Re: Vietnam to make Apple Watch and MacBook
#360In my dad’s lifetime we went from fighting a bitter war with Vietnam to building our most popular consumer electronics there. I wonder what we will build in Afghanistan in my retirement years.