points by ahartmetz 22 hours ago | 0 comments
Stupid work for you, smart work for us (and let's be real, that is the idea) doesn't work forever if the other guys are smart, too. And they are.
[–] mmooss 16 hours ago
[–] ahartmetz 13 hours ago
On the other hand, catching up is usually much faster than doing something for the first time. China is catching up fast. I think the cheating / dishonesty gives Westerners the wrong idea - Chinese cheating is like doping at the Olympics: if you want to win, you have to be among the best and cheat.
[–] mmooss 12 hours ago
> catching up is usually much faster than doing something for the first time
Yes, absolutely. You can see many places have followed that path; you can skip the economic policy and technological R&D and just use mature solutions - South Korea and Taiwan, for example.
The 'cheating' - I assume you mean about IP - is nonsense to me. Who made the rules? The people who want to preserve their IP, and they would make different rules if they didn't have IP themselves. China didn't make those rules.
[–] ahartmetz 11 hours ago
I also mean stuff like stealthily reducing quality until the customer notices and such things. It seems to be more common in B2B than in B2C.
[–] RussianBot9580 4 hours ago
That's what Americans want to buy: barely functional cruft to sell at Walmart. China also makes plenty of innovative quality products. The US bans those. Cars are one example.
But it's difficult to leap ahead from step 0 to step 3, as you need the gains from step 0 to achieve step 1, the benefits from step 1 to achieve step 2, etc. Some of those benefits are food, shelter, healthcare, education (hard to have engineers without it, for example), physical infrastructure, finance, honest and skilled government, etc.