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.
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.