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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?

#881

Post by DeathArrow »

matt-p wrote: post #296
logifail wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I don't get why the EU can't be just a big common market with free competition, open borders. Why do we even need lots of institutions, bureaucracy, directives on top of directives and quotas for farming and fishing?

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

#882

Post by numa7numa7 »

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…

The question you're actually asking is:

When will China start innovating instead of copying?

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

#883

Post by lolinder »

forgotoldacc wrote: post #731
lolinder wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Be careful extrapolating based on China's current population and demographics. Too much of our armchair assessments of China's velocity is based on their meteoric rise on the backs of a historically large working-age population—a population that is now rapidly aging out of the workforce with nothing to replace it thanks to the one child policy. The US's demographics aren't stellar, but they're a lot better off than m…

India has a bigger population but they haven't risen anywhere near the way China has. China's rise was due to smart planning and investment in their people and infrastructure. The country went from peasant farmers to the manufacturing hub of the world in a generation. Now they're in the process of becoming a major hub of knowledge workers while keeping a strong manufacturing backbone. And one thing I rarely see menti…

India's population pyramid is about where China's was in 2000. Their bulge of working age people is just barely hitting the workforce, so it's way too early to say what the outcome will be by 2045 when they've ridden the wave the way China did.

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

#884

Post by numa7numa7 »

sien wrote: post #585
xivzgrev wrote: post #557

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Competitive edge is new innovation and I don’t see that changing anytime soon. The rules and culture favor it in the US, more so than anywhere else on earth. China didn’t invent the iPhone or chat gpt. But they excel at optimizing.

DJI is the premier drone company in the world. Also in places where Chinese electric cars are not being blocked they are really taking off. In 20 years for billions of people the most common car will be a Chinese one. China is able to build nuclear reactors while the US is floundering. The Chinese may well be the first to produce electricity from fusion. People come back from Shenzhen now to the US and say that the U…

EV's, Drones, Nuclear power.

Once again optimizing on technologies invented in the west.

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

#885

Post by numa7numa7 »

sien wrote: post #673
horns4lyfe wrote: post #625

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those things are all optimizing…

Fusion would be something totally new. The other thing to look at is the number of high impact papers in Materials Science, Chemistry, Engineering, Comp Sci and Physics and look at where they are being written. Check the image from The Economist in the article below : https://asiatimes.com/2025/03/behold-chinas-innovative-golde... It's great for the world that China now has hundreds of millions of people who are able…

Fusion hasn't been invented yet.

If following the pattern it will also be invented in the West and optimized in China.

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

#886

Post by vixen99 »

anticodon wrote: post #848
forgotoldacc wrote: post #731

Earlier quoted context omitted.

India has a bigger population but they haven't risen anywhere near the way China has. China's rise was due to smart planning and investment in their people and infrastructure. The country went from peasant farmers to the manufacturing hub of the world in a generation. Now they're in the process of becoming a major hub of knowledge workers while keeping a strong manufacturing backbone. And one thing I rarely see menti…

India has no energy. It imports most of its energy. While China has lots of coal and burns it to provide energy for its industries.

'India imports most of its energy'. So what's happened to the extremely abundant 'free energy' available from the sum in India. They have the expertise, they could make the funding available. What is missing in their thought processes or is there something wrong with the premise?

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

#887

Post by vixen99 »

unethical_ban wrote: post #876
refurb wrote: post #787

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, he said “"We borrow money from Chinese peasants to buy the things those Chinese peasants make” He did not refer to all Chinese as peasants. China would like you think that though.

It was an unnecessary slight by the vice president of the United States. Vance is a provocateur, and I'm not sure he's an intelligent one.

Definition: Peasant: 1. A member of the class constituted by small farmers and tenants, sharecroppers, and laborers on the land where they form the main labor force in agriculture. 2. A country person; a rustic. 3. An uncouth, crude, or ill-bred person; a boor.

You unsurprisingly choose the third option. Uncouth, crude and or ill-bred people are probably not especially productive in their working life.

We do know that in China, rural people flock to the cities (where they have diminished welfare provisions and 'rural' status, do the work and are then expected to return to their homes in the country.

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

#888

Post by 34679 »

numa7numa7 wrote: post #882
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…

The question you're actually asking is: When will China start innovating instead of copying?

Who in America is China copying with their high speed rail? Who are they copying with their drone displays? What about their skylines that more closely resemble our sci-fi films than anything we've actually built?

The truth is, China is already the most advanced country in the world and if we ever manage to modernize our infrastructure and manufacturing, we will be copying them.

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

#889

Post by jmull »

runeks wrote: post #860
matt-p wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In theory, you're right, however it ignores some key points; -Some of their costs are in fact linear based on the cost of the item. Inventory cost doubles, perhaps now they have to take out higher interest debt to finance that. Things like insurance would also at least double. Transaction fees (like card fees at about ~2%) and other parts (like returns risk) also increase linearly. -Reduced sales due to increased pri…

> Inventory cost doubles, perhaps now they have to take out higher interest debt to finance that. I'm pretty sure Footlocker doesn't borrow money to pay Nike up front for inventory. Nike is smart enough to know that there's zero chance their shoes will be sold if they sit in a warehouse, so Nike might as well ship them to retailers and get paid gradually as the shoes are sold to consumers.

That's just a for-instance.

The general point is that additional cash is tied up in shoes which cannot do something else. Who bears the burden of the loss of that additional cash changes over time (Nike to Footlocker to consumers) but the burden is bourn.

(And that's before you count the impact of the inevitable reduction in unit sales. There're various kinds of overhead that don't scale linearly units sold, or that have a long lag before scaling, or have a significantly-sized step function in the scaling.)

BTW, where did the cash go? Oh yeah, into the hands of the US federal government. We have a word for that: tax.

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

#890

Post by vixen99 »

yodsanklai wrote: post #495
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…

> We need to anticipate a future where China is equal to America on a per capita basis, but four times bigger. Is it even possible in terms of resources? there are limits to growth and it may not be feasible for 1.5 billions people to consume and pollute as much as an average American. Also are the US willing to lose their supremacy peacefully?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pollution_in_China
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