Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

911–920 of 1001 posts

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

#911

Post by test6554 »

myrmidon wrote: post #171
pjc50 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Fishing is less profitable for the whole UK than Warhammer. This sounded completely insane to me. I tried to look up numbers and found that Games Workshop brings in > 0.5 billion in revenue (!!), compared to all of UKs fisheries at 1 billion-ish (profit margins are, as you'd expect, pretty favorable for the plastic figurines that they don' even paint for you). Thanks for this interesting fact.

A game that is not on a computer... So they don't even calculate damage or move distance for you. And you have to buy each figurine and paint it yourself...

And people are spending all their money on this? That's why we're not mining asteroids right now?

I feel like people could just use AR glasses for this and spend nothing but their time.

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

#912

Post by dahart »

hermitdev wrote: post #534
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That article seems confused, e.g.: > If government spending isn’t going to pay government workers, it must be going to pay people who work in the private sector — nonprofits, for-profit contractors, consultants, and so on. In other words, state capacity is being outsourced. The money is going to social security payments . Social security went from Meanwhile there is another reason why the number of government workers…

> Meanwhile there is another reason why the number of government workers has gone down: Uh...excluding the very recent cuts this year under Trump; the number of civilians in the US Federal work force has gone up fairly steadily. [0] We had 23.592 million civilian employees in Jan 2025. 21.779M in Jan 2021, after being largely stagnant overall the previous 10 years. That's a net change in excess of 1.8M employees unde…

> the number of civilians in the US Federal work force has gone up fairly steadily.

The graph you provided is not Federal government, it’s all US government which includes state & city, and other types of government employees. It should be expected this grows with population size, and to get a sense of whether it’s really shrinking or growing, you should divide by population. But in any case, this chart doesn’t backup your claim that Federal government is growing.

The link to the Federal government was just underneath that graph: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES9091000001. US Federal government absolute size peaked in 1991 and has gone down slightly since then. If you divide this one by population, the decline would be a bit stronger and more obvious. The ~10 year spikes are census workers. Notice we can see the peak in 1991 with or without the census spikes.

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

#913

Post by vidarh »

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #29
vidarh wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forcing China to become more independent of exports to the US also means China will care less about being in the good graces of the US. It cuts both ways.

One could easily have the impression that despite this, China has never really given a rat's ass about being in the good graces of the US, and that when they do relent it is often the case that they do not do so in good faith at all. If they comply with ethics and human rights, it's to the absolute minimum of that and in an underhanded way designed to undermine, but often not even that and they're just cheating and g…

It depends on what you're looking at. They've avoided a confrontation with Taiwan, for example. How long that will last if/when they no longer consider open conflict with the US to be a major consideration is anyones guess.

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

#914

Post by nashashmi »

hx8 wrote: post #83

> But if we bump the cost of freight, insurance, and customs from $5 to, say, $28, then they wholesale the shoes to Footlocker for about $75. And if Footlocker purchases Nike shoes for $75, then they retail them for $150. Everyone needs to fixed percentages to avoid losses. I don't understand this paragraph. If Footlocker was okay with $50 profit/shoe, why do they need to claim $75 profit/shoe in their costs per shoe…

For every week, the shoe does not sell The price goes down 10%. So very quickly you lose your margin.

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

#915

Post by dahart »

DeathArrow wrote: post #877
hermitdev wrote: post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Meanwhile there is another reason why the number of government workers has gone down: Uh...excluding the very recent cuts this year under Trump; the number of civilians in the US Federal work force has gone up fairly steadily. [0] We had 23.592 million civilian employees in Jan 2025. 21.779M in Jan 2021, after being largely stagnant overall the previous 10 years. That's a net change in excess of 1.8M employees unde…

And beside government institutions there are lots of institutions at state and city level.

Institutions at the state and city level are called “government”, and those are included in the data parent linked to.

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

#916

Post by Workaccount2 »

lolinder wrote: post #715
spaceman_2020 wrote: post #705

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but that’s not the same level of diversity as an atheist Frenchman and a muslim Algerian and a Christian Ivorian. The Sichuanese might not get along with the Cantonese, but they’re ethnically the same people with a shared culture

No, they're not. The Chinese have never been especially unified until very recently and they're internally quite diverse on all the key measures of ethnicity: their languages are mutually unintelligible, their religious belief systems span the entire breadth of world religions plus a wide spectrum of home grown ones, and their value systems are very different. One China is a convenient fiction invented by an authorit…

I can't help but feel that this can be said for any country anywhere. Compare New Englanders to Southerners in the US. They are totally different, but they are still wayyy more similar than Southerners are to Cantonese.

It's easy to track differences between people around you, in your country, and very hard to track difference between people in other countries. This creates an illusion of "We are very different, and they are all the same".

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

#917

Post by ninetyninenine »

grayfaced wrote: post #844
ninetyninenine wrote: post #719

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None. There’s no equivalent Chinese show. Just like how a while back there was no equivalent industry. It will get there. Follow the trendlines of all the industries and if it matches what happened with the entire manufacturing industry, solar industry, and various other industries it will eventually surpass the US. Right now it’s quickly becoming on par with a lot of stuff in the west. Eventually it will surpass the…

I wasn't making a point about blockbusters though. Star Wars would fail my criteria as well. It's not about money it's about influence. The stuff you listed is the antithesis of that, watered down for a global audience. I'm talking about the "I want to visit CityX" because I saw what it's like and that's my vibe. It's not a matter of growing the industry because it's already orders of magnitude bigger then what it co…

No one in Asia wants to visit nyc because of friends, sienfeld or sex and the city. These shows to them are mostly raw garbage. The reason is because these shows are culturally focused. Its catered exclusively to the type of American humor and values that most people in Asia do not give two shits about.

They want to visit Hollywood because they want to see the technology that built these blockbusters because internationally everyone understands heroism, sacrifice and special effects. Additionally these movies aren’t watered down. The writing and the effects have gone through years of development to get to that point. It just doesn’t cater to your sensibilities. The term is snobbish.

The writing for Seinfeld and friends and sex and the city took years to get where they are. These aren’t inborn cultural talents. You can easily compare stories from past American movies to see how cheesy and stupid they are. It takes development for stories to come to where they are today and it’s a back and forth between the audience and writers. As writers write more stories audience members learn and become more sophisticated and twists and humor that worked in the past become cliche. Why do you think you’re too snobbish to appreciate something like avengers? You think someone in the 50s wouldn’t appreciate it? Fuck honestly if the whole mcu up till end game came out in the 50s that whole thing would win a Nobel peace prize.

China is 100% going through this learning process right now. The audiences sophistication and the writers as a result are growing at a breakneck pace. I think movies from China that might appeal to who you are is crouching tiger hidden dragon or Hero as these movies share the more universally appreciated parts of Chinese culture and since that is what you’re interested in, I recommend them to you.

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

#918

Post by pc86 »

TrapLord_Rhodo wrote: post #909

The problem i have with this article is they use a "Hypothetical shoe" that retails for $100, but then directly quote a $220 shoe for the "American Made" side. Then use this as the entire justification for the price disperity. People absolutely pay $220 for "Chinese made" shoes too. It's all about branding... Rockwell is price competitive with both kuka and fanuc. If you want to talk about 'Difference in manufacturin…

Derek writes a lot of great fashion threads but he is a dyed-in-the-wool partisan and it comes through any time he touches on things remotely political. This doesn't mean he's wrong and it isn't even necessarily a bad thing, but it's important to keep that in mind and just remember that when he says something political he likely arrived at that political opinion first and is picking examples/hypotheticals to support it, and not vice versa.

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

#919

Post by IX-103 »

consp wrote: post #740
kilolima wrote: post #685

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did they hire those software engineers along with their unions? Not quite. It's all about labor and getting rid of the class that used to (and could have) threatened the elites.

SE will one day realize they are as screwed as the average worker and unionize in some way. The endless money pits are not for every SE, even today the majority does not work for the creme-de-creme of well paying companies. While specialists and smooth talkers might profit from the current model, as always is the case, most won't.

Unions are a bad solution to the problem of companies not vaulting their employees. Unfortunately, without altruism by the corporations or governments action, they are also the only effective solution.

I'd prefer we look to other countries that have solved the problem in other ways, such as including representatives of the employees in the board.

Also, we need to remember that corporations exist at the mercy of the state, having received a special dispensation (corporate charter) to exist. Those companies that are not a net benefit to society have no right to exist and ought to be dissolved.

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

#920

Post by cratermoon »

lmpdev wrote: post #608
eyko wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also worth considering that certain industries (fisheries and agriculture for instance) are subsidised. It's in our national interest to maintain production capacity, so profits are the least of our concerns. Both the UK and the EU's agricultural sectors are heavily subsidised mainly for this reason. It's cheaper to import than to produce locally, especially with our environmental standards and targets, but we n…

That’s the biggest thing I took away from the whole Boeing corporate disaster You need to maintain at least a minimum amount of internal competency in almost all areas If you completely give away a capability to other countries (in this case, fishing knowledge and labour) it is much harder to bring back than just coughing up the money Those sectors you let die might not matter right now, but they might matter later.…

> You need to maintain at least a minimum amount of internal competency in almost all areas

This is exactly what Dr. L. J. Hart-Smith wrote in "Out-Sourced Profits – The Cornerstone of Successful Subcontracting", a paper from 2001 https://techrights.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/2014130646...

See also How Tech Loses Out over at Companies, Countries and Continents https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/how-tech-loses-out/, where the author asks, "In any organization, in any company, in any group, any country and even any continent, what level of technical capability, do we need to retain?"

Once you've outsourced everything except the management work, the organization forgets how to do the thing they're supposed to be managing.

Post reply on HN