sweatersocialist [comrade/them] @hexbear.net

1d ago

"made in china is garbage!!" no, they just keep all the good shit they make and send the slop to the piggies

with all this tariff stuff, i keep seeing libs coping that we dont need chinese manufacturing anyway (lmfao) because “they can only make cheap garbage”

these people are so fucking stupid.

US companies are ORDERING cheaply made garbage to sell you at massive profits for themselves. that doesnt mean china is incapable of making good reliable shit. your companies dictate the quality of what they’re having manufactured there. they use the cheapest materials, the lowest level of quality assurances and checks, and this is all to save them money at the expense of the product’s reliability and at YOUR expense. you’re a piggy being fed the slop you paid for. welcome to america.

62 comments

my dad says the same thing as you about merchants here in Palestine ,that they only buy the cheap stuff from china and not their good stuff

I know someone who's job was mostly to go to China and find the cheapest workable products to slap his company's logo on. He talked about how sometimes they'd commision stuff from a factory that would later get shut down for labor violations and the like a year or two later. And then rinse, wash, repeat.
His take away was EVIL CHINA and not the fact that his job kept running to the lowest bidder that was skirting regulations left and right.
- How can you see it, with your own eyes, and still not understand?
  
  Because that would mean he is doing a bad thing and be obligated to stop or have to call himself a bad person, neither of which he is willing to do, so it must be the fault of the Chinese, even though they are clearly shutting down these factories who participate in these abuses, unlike in the U.S. where they will just be like 'how could we have known immigrant kids were working in our factories, all their paperwork that we purposefully didn't double check was correct! We need to change the laws to lower the legal working age, so that way poor innocent business owners don't get duped by malicious immigrant children.'
- In Merica those factories would never get punished, the shutdowns are commie tyranny

I remember when a friend of mine came back from living in some agricultural communities in West Africa. he and his wife were there for ~2 years. he and I had done a lot of farm work together for a year, so when he got back we talked about how things worked there.
one thing I will never forget is that among the big exports was rice. everybody was involved in the production labor side.
he said the rice grown for export was completely different from the rice they grew for themselves. and that the rice they grew for themselves was absolutely incredible quality, beyond what he understood rice could be like in texture and taste. the export was like cheap junk and went to western nations (Europe mostly) with locals saying that it was fine because they didn't know any better and they seemed to like it because they kept buying it.
in the decade+ since, I have found this paradigm to be far more common than not across agricultural products and it is unsurprising to see it exist in other realms of decoupled production/consumption loops mediated by capitalism.
- Because the rice is mostly local "heirloom seeds", while the export rice are tailored for export and producing large quantities.

Westerners broadly don't understand that companies who contract factories in China to make shit are ultimately in control of the quality. They will only pay a certain price for goods, so corners need to be cut, worse materials, skipped steps, less QA, etc..
- Every country has their own standards. These standards don't apply to the exports. That is responsibility of importing country. Honestly, huawei exceeds my expectations with a 5 year old phone that was for low budget customer even when it was brand new. I needed to replace battery recently, it was pillowing, it costed me no more than 15 dollars for new original battery replacement from official tech support

Idk my Anker headphones and Lenovo laptop are pretty great
- thats because those companies paid for better manufacturing and quality. thats the point
- The ibm thinkpads were top tier though
  
  I have a 20 year old Lenovo that still works so I'm a little partial

There's a paradigm shift happening but you still get people freaking out over chinese bicycle parts like handlebars or bottle cages. Like I probably wouldn't buy cheap ass carbon stuff directly of temu because the QA is gonna be ass and carbon doesn't really tell you anything before it fucks up, but imagine being scared to order a metal road because it's made in china. It's a metal rod! It's not hard to do!

There is an old story about Japanese manufacturing circa late 70s being contracted by an American corp. Not sure how truthful it is, but the Americans create a contract that specifies an acceptable failure rate of 5% for the widgets. The Americans meet with the Japanese to receive the first shipment, and they provide the package with another small box. The Americans are perplexed. "What's is this other small box?" "Oh, those are the 5% of failures specified in our contract."
American business had to learn quality control from Asia, and yet the racist chauvinism still overrides this material reality.
- It is absolutely true in spirit, Asia has always been at the forefront of quality engineering and lean manufacturing.

We're perfectly capable of making garbage right here in the US as well. Especially when the workers on the shop floor are overworked, underpaid, and as a result, don't give a shit. And when they keep firing the most experienced people for bullshit transgressions like calling in sick a couple too many times, or complaining about the planners being absolute fucking idiots.

Would this be an example of survivorship bias? Where people for decades have been assuming cheap Chinese goods are crap, only because they notice the cheap shit breaking and not the high end stuff?

What I've found striking in the last couple of years is that even the bargain basement garbage coming out of China has surprisingly good build quality. Like, you get something that is lacking essential features and perhaps poorly designed, but the plastics are the kind of thing you'd expect in a premium product built in the West
- It's really funny that you have chuwi making laptops with the most high end screens imaginable that you can't find anywhere else in western OEMS and then attach it to a multiple generations old x86 CPU and a weak 35 watt battery.
  Apparently the weaker batteries are there because Chinese students dont often use their laptops in class and only use their laptops around 3-5 hours all around the day, go figure.
- Something something productive forces. You don’t just absorb the west’s manufacturing and not become genuinely skilled in your own right.
  I mean, ffs, Shenzhen is literally everyone’s go-to place for electronic hardware.
  
  Shenzhen produces 90% of the world's electronic devices

There's a confusion about China. Let me at least give you my opinion. The popular conception is that companies come to China because of low labor cost.
I'm not sure what part of China they go to but the truth is China stopped being the low labor cost country many years ago and that is not the reason to come to China from a supply point of view.
The reason is because of the skill and the quantity of skill in one location and the type of skill. The products we do require really advanced tooling and the the precision that you have to have in tooling and working with the materials that we do are state-of-the-art and the tooling skill is very deep here.
In the US, you could have a meeting of tooling engineers and I'm not sure we could fill the room. In China, you could fill multiple football fields.
It's that vocational expertise is very, very deep here and I give the the education system a lot of credit for continuing to push on that even when others were de-emphasizing vocational.
Now I think many countries in the world have woke up and said you know this is a key thing and we've got to correct that but China called that right from the beginning.
Tim Apple in 2017 https://youtu.be/_ng8xQ-SNGc?t=566
- commenting for link
  
  huh. I posted the youtube video where Tim Cook (Apple CEO) says it. The time stamp is 9m26s.
  The reason I post this quote is that it is an example where an American CEO admits that China manufactures higher quality products than the US and he even says that the labor from China costs more.
- I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
  yewtu.be
  inv.nadeko.net
  yt.artemislena.eu
  piped.video

This is it. Websites like Taobao and 1688 are the Alibaba and Aliexpress for China internally and there is amazing shit on there. I've got a chrome extension that can scan photos to see if they're sold on those sites and I can often find the same clothes at a 10x markup
- What extension
  
  Commenting for you as well because Lemmy doesn't give notifications for other thread replies https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/1688-aibuy-official-globa/ecpkhbhhpfjkkcedaejmpaabpdgcaegc?hl=en-GB
- Aliexpress has great stuff on it.
  
  It's like anywhere, it has great stuff but is also full of crap. With a bit of research you can find the good things on there
- What extension
  
  I use 1688 AIBuy https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/1688-aibuy-official-globa/ecpkhbhhpfjkkcedaejmpaabpdgcaegc?hl=en-GB
  
  If you download the taobao android app it has the camera thing built in

Made in China was garbage.
They're moving into more sophisticated manufacturing with each Five Year Plan.
Joe Public doesn't always update his worldview.
- dipshit Bessent certainly hasn't

The same person who says this to you will have a phone in their pocket Made in China.
China are very good at high quality manufacturing, that's why they do all the manufacturing of practically everything. Cheap shit that's low quality has caused an undue reputation to form because bad experiences are s more memorable than every single high quality product.

one hope i have for tariff negotiations is that china forces the US to open market again for Huawei and BYD. Need those sweet, sweet treats
- also hoping that
- I just want to throw money at JLCPCB with some clear idea of how much money I need to throw.

I really miss ordering the nice stuff direct from factories in China. Things like fountain pens, pencils, other art supplies I use, got a nice watch, etc.
Even with tariffs there are things I’m willing to pay +145% on because I already thought it was ridiculous the quality for price I could find compared to the other crap out there. Like my watch; 80 bucks, would turn into a little over 200 I think, and that’s still almost 300 less than an equivalent European made watch with the exact same movement and similar case materials.

No offense, but I don't hear anyone saying that Chinese only make garbage anymore; not in years. Maybe the Americans (libs and non-libs) are coping, but most Americans know that the Chinese manufacture all of their good stuff too now.
Remember when Americans used to diss Chinese steel? Not in a long time.
- I see "garbage quality Chinese manufacturing" about once a week or more, even here on Lemmy. Envious of your blocklist curation I guess
- i see it all the time. also shit about “tofu bricks” and child labor
  you cant visit a single thread on reddit about china on the default subs that doesn’t contain one or more of those tropes in the replies
- there's an entire genre of videos on social media and online (tiktok, youtube, instagram, etc) where it's comparing old western products like anvils and tools to modern Chinese ones, with the outcome always being that the modern chinese one is worse.
  They're not comparing apples to apples though, they're comparing like $50 harbor freight anvils to old $1000 solid steel industrial anvils.
  
  Modern hardware failing compared to old hardware (that survived) is an international thing.
  Y'all need to stop watching so much garbage. It's just there to trigger you.
- "Chinesium" is still mentioned in nearly every car forum regarding cheap parts and tools
- You'll still hear it in the Midwest where the cope is stronger than the brandy.
- My own family used to be like this, especially since they are blue collar industry workers, but lately they have been singing praises about chinese cars, chinese products etc...

The propaganda is more sophisticated than just quality though. I have a friend who insists that using Temu is evil because it’s all made by “slave labour” and even though she accepts Amazon is also bad, “it’s not the same”.
- Lmao never mind that most Amazon sellers are just buying the same stuff in China and marking it up to twice or more the cost.
- no clue what to even do with someone like that. if you ask them how its not the same they’ll just hit the infinity loop NPC response “it just isnt”

I get the good stuff imported myself

I don't think China is intentionally making cheap stuff. Because they very well do make high precision stuff too. I think some casio watches off the top of my head are made in China. They're made pretty well too. Ofc some are made in Thailand and their best stuff is made in Japan so they can keep a tighter watch on their most elite stuff.
Stuff in China is made cheap because that's what people ask for. If people want more expensive stuff I have no doubt that China can produce that as well. Because of China's ultra capitalist industrial machine, they are capable of producing so much so quick for so cheap.
- i dont think china is intentionally making cheap stuff, its what people ask for
  thats the whole point of my post friend.

- im not sure you read my post+’hur dur’ is ableist

Today I learned it’s only libs.
Great post
- Both conservatives and "liberals" in America are literally liberals by the real definition
  
  It’s good though. Helps me isolate the fascists

62 comments