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How much do you think it costs to make a pair of Nike shoes in Asia?

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Re: How much do you think it costs to make a pair of Nike shoes in Asia?

#291

Post by rayiner »

pjc50 wrote: post #102
rayiner wrote: post #42

Americans need to get over their view of “Asia” as being about making shoes. When I was working in engineering in the early aughts, we mocked the Chinese as being able only to copy American technology. Today, China is competitive with or ahead of America in key technology areas, including nuclear power, AI, EVs, and batteries. We need to anticipate a future where China is equal to America on a per capita basis, but f…

> US will find itself in the same position the UK is in now The thing is .. there's a point here, but it's not at all tied in with physical products. People are obsessed with one side of the ledger while refusing to see the other. Most of the stuff the UK is struggling with (transport, healthcare, energy) are "state capacity" issues. Things where the state is unavoidably involved and having better, more decisive lead…

The free traders also need to accept the reality that the UK’s decline started long before Brexit and disputes about fishing. In terms of per capita GDP, the UK lost its edge over the rest of Europe in the 1970s, and then simply never recovered from the 2008 global financial collapse. Without the empire, the UK’s “competitive advantage” in financial and legal services wasn’t worth shit.

I strongly suspect the US cannot maintain its outsized per capita wealth, on the back of the reserve dollar, in a world where China has an economy twice the size. Just as the UK couldn’t when the US economy overtook the British empire and the dollar replaced the pound as the reserve currency.

The question, instead, is how we’ll be able to adapt to that new reality. And I suspect we’d rather be Germany in that future than the UK.

Re: How much do you think it costs to make a pair of Nike shoes in Asia?

#292

Post by overfeed »

ebruchez wrote: post #193
throw310822 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yeah, it's real easy when you employ an army of nation-state hackers No it's not, even if it were true. Is it really that hard to admit that the Chinese people are industrious, smart, ambitious and have extremely high education level? And that the state has directed the development of the country wisely in the past 40 years?

This sounds like official Chinese propaganda. This was truer at some point, but things have started turning bad for China with the advent of Xi Jinping. 20-25 years ago, the country was hopeful, developing fast, opening up. Foreigners started moving there, seeing it as a new land of opportunity. Much of that is gone. The economy is in bad shape, youth unemployment is massive, the country is a dictatorship, nobody wan…

> This sounds like official Chinese propaganda

Go to any top-N American University, pick a random STEM faculty and count the number of Chinese (nationality) post-grads, post-docs and faculty. Alternatively, look at the trajectory of science publications coming out of Chinese universities vs the US. Underestimating China's brain-trust is doing oneself a disservice.

Re: How much do you think it costs to make a pair of Nike shoes in Asia?

#293

Post by [deleted] »

Herring wrote: post #223
rayiner wrote: post #42

Americans need to get over their view of “Asia” as being about making shoes. When I was working in engineering in the early aughts, we mocked the Chinese as being able only to copy American technology. Today, China is competitive with or ahead of America in key technology areas, including nuclear power, AI, EVs, and batteries. We need to anticipate a future where China is equal to America on a per capita basis, but f…

> What will be America’s competitive edge in that scenario? Comparative advantage means countries benefit from specializing in producing goods or services where they have the lowest relative opportunity cost - not necessarily where they're the best overall. Even if China focuses on technology (and this is far from decided), America can still thrive by specializing in other areas where its relative efficiency or uniqu…

[deleted]

Re: How much do you think it costs to make a pair of Nike shoes in Asia?

#294

Post by Symbiote »

matt-p wrote: post #285
Symbiote wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A precision injection moulding factory can (I assume) relatively quickly start producing other plastic parts for military use. Post-Brexit, there's now increased incentive for Games Workshop to build their next factory in the EU. (Games Workshop is one company, but this applies to every manufacturing company in the UK.)

Brexit is mad, driven by nostalgia etc. However, if we got a free trade agreement with the US would the inverse be true, EU companies are better off moving to the UK due to brexit? What about just a FTA with all commonwealth countries (why haven't we done this??)?

Trump is unpredictable. He made a new free trade agreement with Canada and Mexico in his previous term, but has put tariffs on some Canadian goods this time round. That isn't going to reassure investors.

A FTA with the USA would come at a significant price — the UK would be pressured to accept low-quality American agricultural produce, and lower many other standards from their current European level. If it does this, that reduces the global value of British exports.

Re: How much do you think it costs to make a pair of Nike shoes in Asia?

#295

Post by Izikiel43 »

pjc50 wrote: post #102
rayiner wrote: post #42

Americans need to get over their view of “Asia” as being about making shoes. When I was working in engineering in the early aughts, we mocked the Chinese as being able only to copy American technology. Today, China is competitive with or ahead of America in key technology areas, including nuclear power, AI, EVs, and batteries. We need to anticipate a future where China is equal to America on a per capita basis, but f…

> US will find itself in the same position the UK is in now The thing is .. there's a point here, but it's not at all tied in with physical products. People are obsessed with one side of the ledger while refusing to see the other. Most of the stuff the UK is struggling with (transport, healthcare, energy) are "state capacity" issues. Things where the state is unavoidably involved and having better, more decisive lead…

> While real UK manufacture successes (cars, aircraft, satellites, generators, all sorts of high-tech stuff) get completely ignored

Here is my take on this:

For those things, you probably need a lot of technical training and/or advanced degrees.

For fishing you just need to be more or less healthy and be able to follow instructions.

Most people are more or less healthy and are able to follow instructions. A small subset of those has advanced technical training and/or advanced degrees.

Therefore, fishing becomes important because a lot more people can do it, and those people vote.

Re: How much do you think it costs to make a pair of Nike shoes in Asia?

#296

Post by matt-p »

logifail wrote: post #267
matt-p wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For another "not just the UK" example france has managed to persuade the EU not to buy british weapons out of the extra defence fund unless the UK give France some of it's fishing rights. Can you imagine being Poland and not getting the best anti-tank weaponry, or the best missiles because you want the french to have more fishing rights? Completely barking mad. https://www.politico.eu/article/uk-rejects-eu-plan-tie-d…

> Completely barking mad Well, we'll see that and raise you the European Parliament in Strasbourg. The EU could get rid of this idiocy overnight, except - well - France. (I have nothing against the French, I've visited France dozens of times and have many friends there.) "Once a month the European Parliament moves from Brussels to Strasbourg at a cost of £150m a year as lorries transport paperwork."[0] "Top EU offici…

Pretty sure you could engineer France leaving the EU by just tweaking fishing quotas, farming subsidy, naming on sparkling wine or removing (as you mention) strasbourg. They will start a riot and then when you don't give in, they'll be gone.

I'm not saying it's what happened to the UK, but we asked for what we needed, got turned down and then left.

Re: How much do you think it costs to make a pair of Nike shoes in Asia?

#297

Post by ignoramous »

rayiner wrote: post #42

Americans need to get over their view of “Asia” as being about making shoes. When I was working in engineering in the early aughts, we mocked the Chinese as being able only to copy American technology. Today, China is competitive with or ahead of America in key technology areas, including nuclear power, AI, EVs, and batteries. We need to anticipate a future where China is equal to America on a per capita basis, but f…

> When I was working in engineering in the early aughts, we mocked the Chinese as being able only to copy American technology. Today, China is competitive with or ahead of America in key technology areas, including nuclear power, AI, EVs, and batteries.

I wrote this not long after (10y ago) and I think this view is still unpopular now as it was then (for reasons beyond me):

  I fully expect Baidu and other tech giants on the Chinese shores to try and push the boundaries of technology. Silicon Valley (and the US) in general has always been the hot-bed of innovation. But with enormous increase in wealth in China (and to an extent in India), I can see these companies being more and more ambitious. Not long ago Andrew Ng of Coursera and Stanford AI Lab fame joined Baidu to further their rival to the 'Google Brain' project. 

  Xiaomi has long been positioning itself as a company with design chops of Apple, engineering chops of Google, and e-commerce chops of Amazon, all rolled into one-- and I can see where they are coming from. If they manage to pull it off, I guess that's when we'd start seeing the proverbial "Death of Silicon Valley" as in, it loosing its strange monopoly and strangle hold on tech world in terms of both talent and innovation.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9421471

Re: How much do you think it costs to make a pair of Nike shoes in Asia?

#298

Post by overfeed »

edm0nd wrote: post #176
Sonnigeszeug wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do understand that Chinese Companies can easily just hire people from abroad? You also do know how many companies moved their knowledge to China on purpose right? The knowledge on how to build things, is learnable even if you don't just 'hack' everything. And there is a lot of signaling happening, that china has surpassed American and European companies in R&D. CATL for example. Whatever China did or still does,…

You do understand that Chinese government can (and does) easily just instruct their nation-state hackers to steal from abroad? They have been caught doing this for decades.

Espionage and fundamental research are not mutually exclusive. The latter reduces the need for the former, and China is doing more of the latter now than it did before.

Re: How much do you think it costs to make a pair of Nike shoes in Asia?

#299

Post by Izikiel43 »

bboygravity wrote: post #289
rayiner wrote: post #42

Americans need to get over their view of “Asia” as being about making shoes. When I was working in engineering in the early aughts, we mocked the Chinese as being able only to copy American technology. Today, China is competitive with or ahead of America in key technology areas, including nuclear power, AI, EVs, and batteries. We need to anticipate a future where China is equal to America on a per capita basis, but f…

Except that that future of a big powerful China doesn't exist. Their birth-rate is 1. Game-over.

The USA is also below replacement levels.

Re: How much do you think it costs to make a pair of Nike shoes in Asia?

#300

Post by harvey9 »

Herring wrote: post #223
rayiner wrote: post #42

Americans need to get over their view of “Asia” as being about making shoes. When I was working in engineering in the early aughts, we mocked the Chinese as being able only to copy American technology. Today, China is competitive with or ahead of America in key technology areas, including nuclear power, AI, EVs, and batteries. We need to anticipate a future where China is equal to America on a per capita basis, but f…

> What will be America’s competitive edge in that scenario? Comparative advantage means countries benefit from specializing in producing goods or services where they have the lowest relative opportunity cost - not necessarily where they're the best overall. Even if China focuses on technology (and this is far from decided), America can still thrive by specializing in other areas where its relative efficiency or uniqu…

India does well on software development partly on a volume basis. Their top end developers often want to move abroad for career development and earning potential. I would not be surprised if potus put tariffs on H1Bs
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