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Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

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Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#791

Post by osiris970 »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #775
osiris970 wrote: post #658

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No county matches the depravity of the U.S justice system? Other countries (china for example) have reeducation and labor camps. The us has its problems, and we should make things better! But it's incomparable, china actively imprisons political enemies, puts Muslims in "reeducation" camps, and has an iron fist on free expression.

The U.S. never made internment camps or had rampant government enforced slavery? Cmon

Do they have them today? Wasn't my claim that they never did.

Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#792

Post by drdaeman »

neuralRiot wrote: post #763
drdaeman wrote: post #742

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If society no longer values these qualities, then we don't deserve better. Isn't it more like "if society has time to think about and can afford those qualities"? If most folks out there have limited finances (CoL-relative, of course) and are just scrapping by, they'll buy the cheapest thing out there that just does the job (vacuums) and tend to ignore any extra luxuries, even if those would be more economically ad…

>People don't buy cheap junk because they don't value quality. They buy it primarily because of affordability reasons, or because their focus is forced to be elsewhere. The focus, thanks to years of advertising, is shifted towards features, new features sell, quality doesn’t, so to keep the price point and “innovate” manufacturers need to lower the quality knowing that a new version will replace the device soon, most…

[dead]

Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#793

Post by AndrewKemendo »

osiris970 wrote: post #791
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #775

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The U.S. never made internment camps or had rampant government enforced slavery? Cmon

Do they have them today? Wasn't my claim that they never did.

Yes

https://eji.org/news/history-racial-injustice-prison-labor/

Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#794

Post by array_key_first »

devsda wrote: post #180
vjvjvjvjghv wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems to be a problem with many companies. Chinese companies are innovating aggressively while others don’t. You see that with 3d printers where Bambu is kicking ass. I remember when GoPro did a drone and it simply wasn’t good. Or American carmakers are trying to turn back the clock on electric instead of embracing it.

I know people like to say that it is American companies that innovate and Chinese companies just copies. This may be true in certain areas, but I think some Chinese companies do take the idea and then they iterate on the product to the point that it outshines the original product all while the original company refuses to act. Sure there are initial product R&D cost overheads but I don't believe that's the only reason…

Pretty much every American company is just a bank with extra steps.

The big boys would rather own real estate and balance books than sink money into R&D. And acquiring companies is simply easier, and it's basically a broken strategy. If you just keep consolidating you just get a higher and higher valuation, while doing literally nothing.

Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#795

Post by teleforce »

cs702 wrote: post #254

According to the Financial Times, Roomba has sold more than 40 million robotic devices, most of them robotic vacuum cleaners.[a] Many of those vacuum cleaners have cameras, can move around on their own, and are connected to the Internet. If they're taken offline, they stop working. Many have microphones too. The new Chinese owner will get control of a network of tens of millions Internet-connected, autonomously mobil…

> If they're taken offline, they stop working.

If people ask me what's wrong with the so called modern technology, this is it.

Local-first system paradigm should be made mandatory and default, not optional [1].

[1] Local-first software You own your data, in spite of the cloud:

https://www.inkandswitch.com/essay/local-first/

Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#796

Post by makeitdouble »

rerx wrote: post #133
makeitdouble wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many general public appliance makers out there have a competitive production line outside of China ? As I understand the only countries where one could barely pull that off would be Korea or Japan, and the local makers are mostly giving up as they lose too much on cost.

BSH (Bosch, Siemens, Neff brands) have their main production sites in Europe, a lot in Germany still. But of course China as well. https://www.bsh-group.com/about-bsh/bsh-worldwide/ Miele (at a more premium price point) production is even more concentrated in Germany. https://m.miele.com/en/com/production-sites-2157.htm (Edit: No replies after 8 hours, but of course they then came in quickly after Europe woke up..)

Thanks !

On Miele, they sure seem to make a sizeable effort to keep as much as they can in Germany, including the motors, electronics etc.

They seem to expand vacuum cleaner factories in China as well, but it could be the best of both world with a company dedicated to push the local ecosystem as much as they can, and go beyond when absolutely needed.

Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#797

Post by tgma »

echelon wrote: post #770
tgma wrote: post #702

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The contradiction is it’s just your opinion where to draw the lines which differs from Elizabeth Warren’s. You think your lines are good and hers are bad. She doesn’t. Many other interested parties would like half of it and want to change the other half. The only way out is to reject centrally-planned line-drawing.

In the theoretical limit, a single monopoly owns and dictates everything. That's bad. In today's mega-conglomerate market duopoly situations, these companies' cash piles and revenues are so big that they can lumber into any industry they want to, dump on the market, kill healthy incumbents, and then leave shittier products and economics in their wake. They get to use their massive "platforms" as taxation dragnets. Th…

You know who else is a monopoly? The Federal government.

I have received better treatment from the worst monopoly companies like Comcast etc than the services from the US government.

Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#798

Post by pornel »

tgma wrote: post #718
pornel wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon wouldn't have kept the manufacturer alive by making Roombas better, but by making it more expensive for other manufacturers to sell their vacuums through Amazon.

What’s the basis for this claim except some ideology you possess?

In the sidebar of the Amazon website (which may vary by device/locale), I get Prime, Echo, Alexa, Fire TV/Tablets, Kindle, Audible listed before all other product categories. The special treatment so explicit, I didn't think anybody would even doubt it, but rather reply "duuuh, of course Amazon.com is for selling Amazon's own stuff".

I'm a follower of Cory Doctorow's anti-enshittification ideology (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FwkaS389W-g). Amazon is well-known for giving preferential treatment to its own products, while squeezing other sellers to pay for placement (Amazon ads).

If you want something more data-driven, see "Self-Preferencing at Amazon: Evidence from Search Rankings" (DOI 10.1257/pandp.20231068), but this one is about everyday products. I'd expect Roombas to get more blatant promos like Kindle, Fire, and Ring products get. For example, if I search for "doorbell" on Amazon, the very first thing I get is a huge promo for Blink products (an Amazon company), four results from random brands nobody heard of, and then another huge promo for Ring (Amazon brand).

Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#799

Post by [deleted] »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #787
mattmaroon wrote: post #647

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No I was pointing out the absurdity of your comment. Cops are called to respond to violent crimes in America, Chinese people aren’t (presumably the response time would be far too long) so even if they were identical people, you’d expect a lot more police shootings than ones by Chinese citizens on the streets of America. The Chinese government may not need its law enforcement officers to carry guns (that’s great but t…

My dude I spied on the Chinese for a decade I know more about the Chinese than you’ll ever understand Let me be clear, the Han don’t care about anybody but the Han that’s a fact. What they do to Tibetans, Uighurs and Muslims is horrible and those repressions shouldn’t exist. However they pale and comparison into the historical horrific conditions of nonstop genocide from 1650 more or less until present day if you inc…

[deleted]

Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#800

Post by mattmaroon »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #787
mattmaroon wrote: post #647

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No I was pointing out the absurdity of your comment. Cops are called to respond to violent crimes in America, Chinese people aren’t (presumably the response time would be far too long) so even if they were identical people, you’d expect a lot more police shootings than ones by Chinese citizens on the streets of America. The Chinese government may not need its law enforcement officers to carry guns (that’s great but t…

My dude I spied on the Chinese for a decade I know more about the Chinese than you’ll ever understand Let me be clear, the Han don’t care about anybody but the Han that’s a fact. What they do to Tibetans, Uighurs and Muslims is horrible and those repressions shouldn’t exist. However they pale and comparison into the historical horrific conditions of nonstop genocide from 1650 more or less until present day if you inc…

I love Hacker News because there are people smart enough to write passably well but insane enough to get to this sort of thing within two hops of discussing a vacuum maker going bankrupt.

I won’t engage the insanity of calling anything we’re doing genocide (I guess we’re just really bad at it because the targeted populations are growing while we do it despite all our weaponry) because what’s the point? But if you think Amazon is more evil than the CCP because police shoot more Americans than the population of China, my only hope is that you learn to use logic as coherently as the language.

It is, however, about as likely as my Roomba assassinating me because the CIA ordered it to. I say this without malice and not as an insult: therapy can help. This is likely trauma response.

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