Western Manufacturing

[Anonymous No.20879118]

It seems like we are very slowly (and far too late) coming to the realisation that outsourcing all your manufacturing eventually outsources your power and control.
This is particularly conspicuous in the case of things like Huawei and 5G, where western countries are desperately pumping money into Scandinavian telcos as they realise, far too late, that getting a competitive foreign country to build your baseline telecommunications infrastructure is fucking insane.
The USA rose to ascendancy on the back of strong domestic manufacturing and has deferred a huge amount of power and influence to China by sending its manufacturing overseas. On top of that, multiple generations of comfortable, first world Westerners don't have the same sort of hunger and drive for success that is pushing incredible advances in the East.
What can you do about this? Do you just try to manufacture high-end products domestically? Do you try to outperform Chinese manufacturing with automation in the place of cheap labour, but if that's the case how does the West even catch up, when we're already lagging and falling further behind when it comes to manufacturing processes?
I see a tremendous amount of "We will stay at the top just because" sentiment that comes from decades of Western success and complacency, and was a hallmark attitude of many empires in their final days.
How do you fix the national security problems that come with offshore manufacturing? How do you compete with a country with 1 billion willing, low paid workers without sacrificing your own labor force's rights? Why isn't this discussed more?

[Anonymous No.20879178]

>>20879118
Idk lol

[Anonymous No.20879246]

Stop taxing wages
Put up trade tariffs instead
>Inb4 cool it with the antisemitism
No

[Anonymous No.20879257]

>>20879118
Something along the lines of overthrowing their government and redirecting all that cheap labor into the coffers of your own megacorps.

[Anonymous No.20879286]

>>20879246
This

[Anonymous No.20879370]

>>20879118
Huawei doesn't make their own components Anon, the west makes them and sells them to Huawei, and then Huawei has been trying to sell them back to the west at a markup. In fact, basically none of China's manufacturing sector is self-sufficient on any level and even for the things that they are, their shipping industry isn't self-sufficient either.

[Anonymous No.20879395]

>>20879246
But American manufacturing would take decades to get onto China's level, if ever at this point, so you'd just be operating at a disadvantage buying inferior products for higher prices. I don't see how tariffs solve the problem at all.

[Anonymous No.20879441]

>>20879395
>But American manufacturing would take decades to get onto China's level, if ever at this point, so you'd just be operating at a disadvantage buying inferior products for higher prices. I don't see how tariffs solve the problem at all.
I think what elon's doing with automated factories is the only move for US in the future

[Anonymous No.20879489]

>>20879441
Yeah I think that would be the only way to leapfrog them too. It's the only workaround when they have such a labor advantage.
But then what do the citizenry actually do when manufacturing supply chain is fully automated? I suppose that's a separate issue.

[Anonymous No.20879519]

>>20879441
That doesn't help the labor population, it fact it drives the domestic gap further.

[Anonymous No.20879585]

>>20879395
>>20879489

Hey, retard. Huawei is repackaging Western components. America with 40 years of offshoring efforts is still a larger manufacturer than China with 40 years of manufacturing subsidization.

[Anonymous No.20879586]

>>20879519
>That doesn't help the labor population, it fact it drives the domestic gap further.

historically, (during the industrial revolution) the average IQ in the US was high. not so high these days. that said, the smart people that do exist in the states will have very well paying jobs. the brainlets will have miserable lives unless we figure out some kind of UBI solution that doesn't completely implode our society

[Anonymous No.20879617]

>>20879585
Then why the sudden Huawei fear and the rush to get baseline components from Ericsson/Nokia et al?

[Anonymous No.20879877]

>>20879118
Your first problem is that you have no ruler. The reason this isn't discussed is that there's nobody actually at the helm of this to ensure unified action against China, only anarchic bureaucrats that have no stake in the future of their countries but plenty of money to make by dealing with the enemy. This lets China prey upon the world with protectionist policies where there are none against them.
Mercantilism was right all along, modern economics is quackery corrupted by political pressures. You have to leverage your own consumer market to get your industry off the ground. If you take imports more than exports, you bleed power.
Consumers are an asset of their own, one to be leveraged. The only way to solve this is to close markets and throw around weight in international influence to get others to do so while you still have the power. Otherwise no effort is going to get you more efficient manufacturing than a Chinese slave or even Chinese automated factories that can afford to sell for less due to currency manipulation.
Of course, none of this will happen, again, because those calling the shots operate within term limits in which they are only encouraged to pillage.

[Anonymous No.20879916]

>>20879118
all on purpose
siphon money and power to the commies
why did it have to be china? why not india or the dozen other countries that could have been easily exploited?

commies. thats why.

[Anonymous No.20879935]

>>20879877
Good insight. So do you see any other outcome than the decline of the West and a return to an almost feudalistic wealth disparity?

[Anonymous No.20879974]

>>20879877
>anarchic bureaucrats
Lol

[Anonymous No.20880004]

>>20879974
If you think of the end of the Soviet Union where corrupt bureaucrats were just looting whatever they could as the power structure fell to pieces, the phrase makes sense.

[Anonymous No.20880017]

>>20879617
Because China put spyware in those western components and people the world over thought it was a stupid plan to pay China so it could expand China's surveillance network.

[Anonymous No.20880050]

>>20880017
Yeah so splitting hairs about the origin of the components is kind of a red herring to the point i was making about a foreign country having its fingers in your telco infrastructure, isnt it.

[Anonymous No.20880058]

Trump for all his faults has changed the game on China. The tiger is stirring once more.
While we have lived in a time when the state has been complacent and absent, it must be remembered that hawks within the state have been waiting for decades to move. Industrial policy, currency weapons, even the more visible 'trade war'. It's all on the table now.
This is not like the British after WW1, the US and its foreign policy elite still has the confidence and energy to fight and counterattack. China got to confidence and moved a decade too early - they will now face the consequence of that hubris.
The greatest danger to this is a Biden presidency but even there, the dial has been shifted permanently that the status quo free trade "thinkers" have been sidelined. Expect the remaining six months of the Trump Presidency to see continuing escalation as the hawks seek to bake in the shift so that there can be no step back.

https://prospect.org/power/steve-bannon-unrepentant/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Komnenian_restoration
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Lighthizer

[Anonymous No.20880117]

Anyone else think the LED street light and smart meter conversion was a massive transfer of wealth to China?

[Anonymous No.20880135]

>>20880017
>expand China's surveillance network.
The US surveillance network was built into most things.

[Anonymous No.20880179]

If Millennials do not turn away from leftist policies then the West is doomed for a century. Business will collapse and the world power will hail from Asia but not without Asian wars. Japan, Koreas, Vietnam, Philipenes, Hong Kong, India and China will 100% go to war with one another when America is no longer able or willing to exert military pressure on the region. When either inability or willingness on America occurs, invest in the defense industry.

[Anonymous No.20880253]

>>20880050
No, because Huawei can't actually continue putting its fingers into western telecom infrastructure without explicit western - actually explicit American - permission.

>>20880135
And the US paid for it. China wants to charge people to expand its network.

[Anonymous No.20880272]

>>20879118
>It seems like we are very slowly (and far too late) coming to the realisation that outsourcing all your manufacturing eventually outsources your power and control
No, the globalists knew exactly what they were doing.

This thread belongs on /pol/. Bye.

[Anonymous No.20880329]

>>20880253
You're saying America is intentioanlly complicit in China spying on them?

[Anonymous No.20880332]

>>20879935
No. This is a Roman Empire scenario, political unity bleeding out into nothing over a long period of time and regional elites holding the pieces together into something different.
>>20879974
What's wrong about that? Have you ever heard of the Managerial Revolution?
You have a heap of civil servants with bullshit jobs that are clearly the ones planning and putting out actual policy, but no chain of hierarchy to which they answer, and no one to take responsibility. Hence, anarchic. Why do you think bureaucracies are even inefficient and, well, bureau-forming? It's because there's nobody above to hold them directly accountable to productivity and efficiency.
Take COVID-19. The West has consistently catastrophically failed to produce timely decisions in this regard. What is the hierarchy one can follow to place the blame here? There is none. You can point to political figures, but they just sign off on policy that is fundamentally settled elsewhere - academia, media, NGOs, etc.
Bureaucratic, anarchic institutions where nobody makes decisions because nobody has to take responsibility if a necessary decision is not taken but everyone will be blamed for going alone with an idea that turns out to be wrong.

[Anonymous No.20880342]

>>20880272
How is a thread about manufacturing not related to business and finance?

[Anonymous No.20880369]

>>20880004
Bureaucracy is the opposite of anarchy
A corrupt crony is not the same as an anarchist
I guess you could use offical might with an anarchist mindset but an anarchist would hate to work as bureaucrat in the first place because hed have to follow too many rules and basically act like a robot - at least when his boss is watching

[Anonymous No.20880401]

>>20880369
i think it's a stupid semantic point to stick on when it was perfectly clear what he was saying

[Anonymous No.20880478]

>>20880329
They were for a long time, because Washington has been distracted for 30 years, or maybe uncharitably some people have been getting kickbacks from the CCP to enable

[Anonymous No.20880547]

>>20879877

Pretty much sums up the problem.

What would be required would be a collective understanding that we have to keep production, supplychains and jobs within our people in order to keep our power.

Seems like the US gets this (at least the Donald does) even if one could argue if the efforts taken have been appropriate or not. The EU is a naive mistake which is built on a globalist offshoring agenda and to hope for change for the better here is a pipedream.

The west is shattered while the CCP is the opposite. The trend is clear, if the west won’t wake up to this soon there will be little we can do.

Glad threads of substance still exist here.

[Anonymous No.20880669]

>>20880332
>Why do you think bureaucracies are even inefficient
Because they have to follow clean defined rules and cant properly adapt to undefined situations
>It's because there's nobody above to hold them directly accountable to productivity and efficiency.
Thats not a problem with bureaucracy in general but with the status civil officals have in the current system
>Bureaucratic, anarchic institutions where nobody makes decisions because nobody has to take responsibility if a necessary decision is not taken but everyone will be blamed for going alone with an idea that turns out to be wrong.
You are on here to something, bureaucrats are very fearful risk averse people that want to get told what to do, thats why they choose that job in the first place
Taking no decisions on covid would have been the correct decision unironically
Also the beurocracy can take no decision on this because its not anarchic but bound by very strict rules - they have to do what politicans say
Sadly the media tells the peasantry what the "right thing" would be so often politicans that have no own opinions except for wanting to get votes do what the media wants them to do

[Anonymous No.20880685]

>>20880401
Not really, he should just had called them out as corrupt

[Anonymous No.20880698]

>>20880547
>the CCP is the opposite
The CCP has been in a protracted power struggle for most of this decade, anon. The imprisonment of Bo Xilai in 2013, Xi Jinping's proclamation that he will be his own successor in 2018? To say nothing of Xi demanding loyalty from the military not two months ago. These are not the actions of a politically coherent autocracy. Rather, it's the actions of an autocracy on the verge of a civil war. That this would dovetail nicely with the average length of a Chinese dynasty doesn't necessarily mean anything, but it doesn't not mean anything, either.

[Anonymous No.20880700]

>>20880272
>>20880369

Your sub par brains do not belong in this thread, jump to ampl general quick

[Anonymous No.20880718]

>>20879118
i think it’s too late. it’s more than clear that the us is (or soon will be) redundant in todays economy. companies like tencent are (allowed to) grow aggressively, while big us companies are (often correctly) subjected to the sherman act. next to that, the “western” consumer is no longer the consumer to target. by 2100 the largest cities will be located in africa and asia; making them the go to market for the “off-shored” production facilities. arguments like “china needs our brains” or “india needs our innovations to produce” are to views which are no longer correct as both of these new superpowers often have great infra and education. the only way to “protect” the us from this (and i’m 100% sure this scenario will play out); is by combining soft protectionism (eg trade barriers and agreements), investing heavily in innovative solutions and becoming less dependent on products made abroad (this will probably mean a loss of value for most us citizens).

[Anonymous No.20880805]

>>20880718
China's a big bubble, anon.

[Anonymous No.20880846]

>>20880698
Sure, the CCP doesn’t come with their own internal struggles. But the insect is fast in the turns and before you know it your house might be infested by it thanks to your blasé attitude.

[Anonymous No.20880911]

>>20880846
China is nothing but internal struggles, and they still don't have a navy that beats taiwan, let alone japan, let alone the US. and thats their only way out. the interior of china, the bits that (theoretically) lead to europe? some of the least hospitable terrain on earth, settled by some of the least hospitable people on earth. and all it takes is one exploded rail line, one collapsed tunnel entrance, and the entire concern is rendered unusable both coming and going.

[Anonymous No.20880949]

>>20880669
Bureaucrats have only to follow the rules they themselves enforce. A bureaucrat creates pointless rules to protect his job and create more demand for his kind in a symbiotic relationship. These rules are not made to be used against them.
I think you are not thinking this problem through to a civilizational and multi-generational scale. Politicians come from these institutions themselves are are beholden to them explicitly through their authority and implicitly through their educational allegiance, as is the legal system.
They can make no meaningful decision until it is so unanimous that the weight of not taking that decision is too greater with the general public than is the weight of disturbing the peace among bureaucrats. In that sense they produce a lagging indicator of public opinion, weighted with bureaucrat bias, rather than the leading role they should be. And to come back to the topic, bureaucrats have plenty of profit to make by dealing with China.

[Anonymous No.20880990]

>>20880911
Chinas navy today is top tier internationally though, and easily beats all other asian navys.

[Anonymous No.20881000]

>>20880990
LMAO

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH

OHHOHOHOHOHOHOH

[Anonymous No.20881058]

>>20880911
Not to mention their strong military propaganda coupled with a huge matching demographic (hint: young single males) which can translate to brute force thats not to be neglected.

The insects biggest problem is the upkeep for the circus though, and if west wakes up in time this might be our blessing.

[Anonymous No.20881191]

>>20881058