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Comment by kredd | Hacker News Reader

The problem is, Chinese consumer tech is full of extremely competitive and cut-throat companies. Some countries don’t like how their government is giving a tons of subsidies for them to progress like crazy (see BYD in 2012 vs now), but they’re delivering results. Combined with their low cost of engineering, the prices in the products are also pretty low, so it’s a no-brained for an average person to buy something for double the price for half of the functionality, just because it was designed in US.

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It's competition. Competition made US what it is and now the US economy has moved from competing on product quality to competing on who buys a better lawyer and politician to block competing companies from existing. Or just buying them.

I wonder how much money is burned in the economy just paying people to write EULAs, laws and service agreements to more effectively avoid liability and screw over customers vs. how many is actualy going into improving products and services?

You're exactly right. I'm not asking for people to choose an inferior, pricier product. My thoughts is that China has the environment to have extreme competition which is leading to better product. This is distinctly not the case here. This is the structural problem that will eventually lead to a loss of competitive edge.

Your call out to BYD is a good one, because it is conceivable that even western-made cars will be made non competitive in 10 years and it seems that we are sleeping through the news (or even encouraging it). I hope I'm wrong, but the road ahead is filled with challenge because the direction is fundamentally wrong, and it will take a lot of effort to reverse course, if that is even possible.

A lot of western companies do not compete anymore - established european countries are basically oligopolies and their lunch is slowly eaten by the more aggressive chinese companies and Tesla. American companies - aside Tesla - is in the same situation. Rich on government contracts and control over their home market.

Basically a lot of established manufacturers are IBMs of this era.

Uh, Tesla got tons of money direct via carbon credits and indirect via consumer EV credits. They're actually in trouble for possibly lying about their range and getting more credits than they should have.

Yeah it sucks. We’re trying to play catch up game for manufacturing industry, but it’s abysmally hard to get it going. I don’t think we can easily pour down money and the talent and processes would just reappear in a couple of years either. So, my assumption is high-scale tech protectionism wars are going to start.

I think people focus on protectionism because that is the traditional tool to fight things like foreign government's unfair subsidy practices. However, you cant just have protectionism without fostering competition and innovation in order to succeed in creating a more competitive product/market. Example would be USA protectionism against Canada's bombardier. It only protected Boeing but didn't actually make Boeing make better planes, as we can see from all the recent issues.

So I think protectioism is fine as long as we properly setup an environment that allows for and encourages competition and innovation. However, that doesn't seem to be a path we are used to taking .

Absolutely agreed. I do think it will go the Argentina way if/when we start mass banning imports of Chinese consumer tech. Well, unless, as you mentioned we start heavily investing and encouraging local competition. I guess, time will show, but I hope we don’t cut ourselves out of good products just because “they’re foreign”.

> Example would be USA protectionism against Canada's bombardier.

Can you give some specific examples? I couldn't find anything. I'm pretty sure that US and Canada have nearly free trade, due to NAFTA.

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

Iirc Boeing complained about Bombardier not being US and the end result is Airbus owns them and they make a plane in the US somewhere.

We used to fund basic research in this country. Now we don't even give corporate handouts in strategic industries.

(Okay we do, see CHIPS Act, but too little too late?)

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