Technology

I was there in the PNW protesting WTO and getting tear gassed as a college student. I believed that the WTO prioritized corporate profits over labor rights, and just allowed them to ship jobs overseas. I'm sad that I was right.

The WTO was always a modern form of merchantilism, predicated on the theory that Wall Street financiers would functionally control the global stock of capital in the end.

The China Problem is, at its root, that too much capital is owned by Chinese nationals. We had similar problems with Japan and Korea in the 80s and 90s, and solved this by forcing them to devalue their currencies and take on loads of foreign debt - both private and public - while hooking themselves up to the Saudi well-head for their energy needs.

But the Seattle protesters never really got a head of steam behind them, because Americans did benefit from all these cheap imports more than they suffered. Like, its hard to talk to a guy making high-six figures in the Bay Area or at Microsoft or Apple campus that they'd have been better off working the textiles or lumber industries or making low-margin electronics.

This was a real J. Sakai "Read Settlers" moment. Very hard to convince colonial settlers to vote/organize against what was their generation's own best interest. If anyone should have been protesting (and quite a few did but certainly not enough), it was folks in Bangladesh or Malaysia or the Philippines, since they were the ones who ended up eating most of the global industrial era shit sandwich.

Now we're faced with Chinese economy that gets to both make a bunch of high value high demand components and domestically consume it, though. And that's not nearly as good a deal as what the post-'08 US economy has to offer.

Yup. For all the making fun of chinesium (socially acceptable racism often when people talk about chinese products. Very clear when one scoffs at a taiwanese product as being trash because chinese but then walks it back when they learn it's of taiwanese origin), in my life I've seen chinese phones, audio products, and cars go from scoffed at to being well regarded in enthusiast communities.

I saw it in other hobbies of mine. Not long ago people only talked about Japanese and German chef knives - Chinese knives must be trash. Then eventually people started to try out Chinese knives that weren't just grocery store bargain stuff. Now progressively people are trying knives from Vietnam. Turns out people have been making knives in these countries for thousands of years. Not as bad but maybe worse is when a person I knew told me they were at first surprised to learn movies were made around the world rather than just being in hollywood, english language. Went from American and European made video game peripherals dominating to more and more chinese competitors like 8bitdo, aula, whatever.

In my lifetime, earlier if it said made in South Korea of made in Taiwan, the assumption was poor quality. Hyundai was scoffed at until like the mid 2010s in my experience. I'm told Japanese products were scoffed at as poor quality until like the end of the 70s and then you had major strikes and violence against Asian American people in the rust belt as anti-Japanese sentiment primarily in regards to competition for autoworkers and steel. Now Japanese made is fully regarded as high quality and the desire to compete in quality+value+parts+serviceability doesn't seem to be of much interest to US or European automakers (that parts availability and serviceability is major)

I imagine it the same as decades back with Korean and Taiwanese made goods, you get you pay for. If you start on the premise that a $200 Chinese product should be as good or better than like a $500 American product, that's a nonsense expectation to have. People will go from a $1200 iPhone and use a $200 Ulephone and determine that $800 phone from a company with a Chinese sounding name, name of their CEO, are trash unless it turns out that that Chinese sounding name company is headquartered in Taiwan or Singapore

Probably no competition for a 5080 or 5090

Don't blink or you'll miss it when it comes.