81–90 of 199 posts
Terrify me? Really? There are other, genuinely terrifying things happening right now: climate change, human rights violations, animal rights, the spread of totalitarianism… that’s terrifying.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is preventing a Chinese brand from selling here not meddling in the free market?
"Free market" implies regulators aren't picking winners and losers etc. If China subsidizes their export industry to make manufacturing in other countries uncompetitive then it's already not a free market. Ideally what you would want is to get China to stop doing that, but now propose a mechanism to get them to.
But what annoys me the most about the article is this constant praise of „China Speed“, Cost-Advantages and Love of the Free Market, as if not every single Chinese Automaker, including its Suppliers down to the tiniest screw is a State owned entity, massively subsidized and in general part of a rigged market.
This is not to take from the accomplishments of the Chinese, but a major part of the last 30+ years of development is just massive screwing and exploiting the western open market and its companies. Yeah, we’ve not forgotten the droves of people blatantly stealing IP on every trade show imaginable and a state completely absent from enforcing IP when ever another Chinese car is dropped to the market that looks 100% like a Benz, Porsche or Land Rover.
I would be more terrified if they didn’t spare a manufacturer who designs and makes cars in Sweden and the US since decades just because the majority owner is Chinese.
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I think my favorite part would be where they were unbolting entire seats and feeding them directly into industrial shredders. "Ford imported all of its first-generation Ford Transit Connect models as "passenger vehicles" by including rear windows, rear seats, and rear seat belts.[1] The vehicles were exported from Turkey on ships owned by Wallenius Wilhelmsen Logistics (WWL), arrived in Baltimore, and were converted…
I wonder if manufacturers are using LLMs to find all the dumb loopholes in the laws that they can.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is preventing a Chinese brand from selling here not meddling in the free market?
"Free market" implies regulators aren't picking winners and losers etc. If China subsidizes their export industry to make manufacturing in other countries uncompetitive then it's already not a free market. Ideally what you would want is to get China to stop doing that, but now propose a mechanism to get them to.
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Our cheap exports: competitive, free markets maximizing efficiency and delivering value to consumers Their cheap exports: sinister pump and dump
Government subsidised corn syrup in everything.
> Their cheap exports: sinister pump and dump
Hang on, are you just talking about American on both sides of the pros and cons
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Really, you will see TCL (and Hisense) nowhere in US? I recommend visiting any store selling TVs. Same goes for Thinkpad/Motorola, but I guess there at could argue these are not original Chinese brands.
Also Tencent, GE, Smithfield Foods, Legendary Pictures, DJI, AMC Theaters…
Uh, about that.. https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-416839A1.pdf
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> Economic efficiency would mean only a few vendors. This is a massive lie monopolists tell you to justify anti-competitive mergers. Increasing entity size has economies of scale (amortizing fixed costs over more units) and diseconomies of scale (bureaucratic overhead, long-distance transportation costs, etc.) Economies of scale peter out with increasing entity size. Amortizing a $1000 fixed cost over 100 units inste…
Maybe.. and "a few" was pulled out of thin air, but these machines were national treasures with immense R&D expense. Think rockets, heavy aircraft, and lithography.. not commodities or software. Having stuff in these categories is kind of "you have to be this tall to ride the ride" The history is complicated and a side quest to the conversation here, but a free market did play out in the US and became fever pitched a…
Things with a large R&D expense are exactly like software. They have that specific problem with copying. If one company pays to do R&D and the others copy them, the one doing it can get out-competed because they have higher costs, and then there is a lower incentive to do it.
The problem comes after the government barges into the market and tries to address that problem with its inverse by granting the first company a monopoly. Then you have more incentive to do R&D, but only by trading the market for a czar.
The problem you have isn't that economies of scale couldn't support more manufacturers, it's that now other companies aren't allowed to make the product until the patent expires, and in many industries the incumbent will then use the profits from an existing patent to buy up other companies and patents and perpetuate a monopoly that was supposed to be temporary.
We don't currently solve that problem well, but the problem isn't that some things require too much scale. Markets where each of the patents required for a product are developed by more smaller entities who then license them like a patent pool is one structure that works as an alternative.
The actual problem is that governments are too shy about enforcing antitrust laws in patent cases, in part because it's counterintuitive to grant a monopoly on purpose and then prosecute over it. But the way it's supposed to work isn't that. Antitrust isn't about having a monopoly, it's about abusing one, e.g. leveraging a patent on one technology into a separate monopoly on an ancillary technology by tying the purchase of the patented product the other one. Or uncompetitive mergers, e.g. a company that already has a dominant market position in one market buying or exclusively (rather than non-exclusively) licensing patents that give it control over a different one.
We could definitely mess that up less than we currently do.
> The more that come (think of a gold rush), the potential returns diminish so it will eventually be hard to either acquire revenue/customers or funding for speculative approaches if they are capital intense.
"Nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded."
If it's hard for new entrants to compete only because there are already so many incumbents, that's fine, because the number of existing suppliers is already large. The problem comes only when there is some artificial barrier to new entrants in a market that doesn't have enough providers as it is.