> and just do what I want to do all day, stress free, for the rest of my life...
In a saner society, jobs would be the measure of how we are mutually useful and bound to each other, and UBI would be there so that people are not coerced with freezing and starvation into doing things. But, when was the last time people got to negotiate the social contract at such a deep level? The French Revolution? Maybe the Bolsheviks? If we could, would we be able to do a good job of setting up something like that? When one remembers that the biggest democracy on the planet keeps electing Trump, one loses hope.
I'm currently working in a cool hardware project (an "audiogame console" in a stealthy form factor), and I when I read this I had to go through the rabbit hole of comparing the hardware of the N64 with what I'm planning to use, an inexpensive ESP32-P4. It was nice to learn that the RSP in the N64 is similar to the RISCVs in the present-day MCU, with 128-bits wide SIMD. Most of my experience with numeric computing has been using at least 64 bits floating point; can't wait to shoot my foot many times with int16.
Say what you may of Temu, and I do think more vetting of certain goods is a good idea, but they fill a very real need. In the part of Europe where I live, the choice is only between intermediaries for the same products coming from China. The local intermediaries sell a very limited picking at staggering margins. And when it comes to certain things, like electronic components, the choice is between importing (old) American stock with a German company as the intermediary, and that's $$$$ and many weeks of shipping, or using Temu or Aliexpress.
There's something unpleasantly snobbish with the way business is done here, a spirit of "if you have to ask the price, our business is not for you". For example, in Instagram, "Local offerings" pop up all the time in the feed. The ones which are truly local end up in a "call us to know more" button, no pricing info disclosed. The ones that show actual prices tend to be shell companies with no employees, no doubt a thin wrapper around an importer from Asia.
Yup. I've even had an (Amazon rather than Temu) power-strip-and-USB combo noticeably sparking and tripping the apartment circuit breakers when plugged in just 6 months after purchase.
Could we interest you in some amazons choice fuses? never more be concerned about replacing a fuse! as these ones, simply wont need replacing! (they survive 5-10x their rated current)
It's a little amusing that he's seemingly linked to the dangerous fuses using his Amazon affiliate links. Hey, may well make a buck if someone's going to buy them anyway, right?
I think the affiliate links work such that any product bought when the lead into the site is the affiliate code will generate affiliate rewards. So even if you don't buy the crap that's linked, maybe you'll buy something else and that counts.
Amazon is does zero quality control on listings, it's just AliExpress which larger margins. At least the reviews at Aliexpress often include exhaustive detail & photos by the terminally skeptical.
I think the line should be much earlier than that. But even with this very thin line, like the parent said, the deficient products are everywhere. Just look at the recalls in any major store here (Carrefour, Action, Leclerc). And that's for the main brands/distributors, go into any bazaar or market and you'll find the exact same products you find on Aliexpress/Temu, but with 10x price markup, like the parent said.
Don't get me wrong. I think companies should be held to higher standards: i just don't understand why only Temu is being held responsible of the entire broken capitalist system.
There are generally two ways governments hold companies accountable for dangerous products.
The first is liability. If they're selling chargers that burn down houses, they get sued, and they don't want to get sued, so they don't want to sell chargers that burn down houses.
The second is regulatory requirements. This one is generally worse. The incumbents capture the regulators to e.g. have the law require their technology or raise costs to exclude new entrants. The rules are often inefficient or poorly conceived with bad cost/benefit ratios. And companies making products that are dangerous but nevertheless comply with the rules will point to their checkbox compliance to dodge liability.
The problem with the first one is that it doesn't work well against companies outside the jurisdiction, because then you can't sue them, and the importer will be a small entity that just files for bankruptcy if you try to sue them. But the second one has the exact same problem. They sell products that don't comply with the rules; if you try to fine them they're outside the jurisdiction and the only thing in the jurisdiction is a fungible importer that will dissolve if you try to go after them.
In that environment the thing that actually works is the third thing. Customers expect some products to be dangerous and rely on product reviews to determine which ones. But this is the thing the second one inhibits, because then overpriced incumbents use their influence over the laws to target any new supplier that tries to establish a trusted brand, which causes the foreign suppliers to have to sell through dozens of unknown labels so they can continue to dissolve them if any of them get prosecuted. And then customers are stuck choosing between the overpriced incumbents and the far cheaper foreign suppliers that may or may not be safe, with many people risking the latter because they have so much lower margins.
EU CE requirements are generally (outside some universally more regulated domains like medical devices) pretty lightweight to deal with, and pretty sensible. I've gone through them, and honestly the biggest pain is finding the applicable standard. Otherwise you basically just need to follow the standard and write up how you think your design follows it, and stick it into a drawer, most likely never to be seen again. You usually have to cause a very notable problem or be very obviously breaking the rules to get the regulator's attention.
How does that help you if someone is drop shipping fire hazards and trying to prosecute them means they just dissolve and create a new shell company?
Also, how does it get you anything over simple liability for fraud and harm? Why does the honest seller have to write a document if nobody is going to look at it and the dishonest one is going to skip doing it anyway?
I think the point of the parent, correct me if i'm wrong, was precisely that current EU regulations are insufficient in protecting customers and really not a burden to put any product on the market, and that anyone arguing regulation is against the little guy is talking in bad faith.
We've already tried the third one in the US before the FDA. A ton of people kept dying.
Milk was filled with borax and formaldehyde, coffee was cut with sawdust/charred bone/lead, spices were often 100% counterfeit.
The market (heavily) incentivized fraud.
In New York, in one year (1857), 8000 infants died to "swill milk" [0].
The second option (FDA and regulation) wasn't lobbied for, and the Food Bill of 1902 actually failed through heavy (counter)lobbying initially [1], until the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 [2] passed.
Invoking 1857 is not a valid argument really, cause consumer priorities were different. Cheaper with some level of risk (which today's American, or German would consider excessive) was preferred option hence the market response as it was - at least it's a reasonable guess.
In less rich countries it is how things work right now.
Industries dump toxic waste into waterways if they can get away with it in the US today (literally today [0]). I agree that I might not be specifically worried about borax milk if FDA was reversed, but I would absolutely expect risky shortcuts in food offerings.
The incentives in the market has never changed. That's what regulation is for, shifting market incentives/forces to favor consumers/society.
Pollution is an externality. If Alice hires a company to do "Hydro Excavation" and they pollute Bob's water, even if Bob knows all about it and is entirely opposed, he can't prevent it by not patronizing them because he isn't a party to the transaction. So the solution to this has to be to prohibit pollution.
Product safety is about information. When Bob knows that a particular brand of milk is adulterated with chalk, he doesn't buy it. Which means that all you need for this is product labeling and liability. If the ingredients list chalk, the customer who doesn't want chalk doesn't buy it. If the ingredients don't list chalk then the seller is not in compliance if the product contains it. If the battery is unsafe then you can both not purchase it because the reviews concluded it was unsafe or sue them if your house burns down. And the compliance process is simple: You list the actual ingredients on the label and have responsibility for damages caused by your product. No massive regulatory bureaucracy with thousands of pages of rules, just liability for fraud and harm.
The problem for all of these is that the perpetrator has to be in your jurisdiction. If companies in China are emitting copious amounts of CO2, regulations in Europe can't do much about it. If those companies are making unsafe products that end up on the world market, you can't sue them in the US because they have no real presence in the US. But complex product regulations don't solve that either, because they too are subject to the same problem; foreign companies drop ship things that don't comply. Nor does putting the liability in the wrong place, because generic transportation or payments intermediaries are in a worse position than the government itself to be the ones evaluating things that come over the border.
Consider it this way: Why doesn't US customs exclude unsafe products from being imported from other countries? Consider what they would have to do to actually accomplish that.
> Customers expect some products to be dangerous and rely on product reviews to determine which ones.
.. which are of course the easiest thing to fake.
> then overpriced incumbents use their influence over the laws to target any new supplier that tries to establish a trusted brand, which causes the foreign suppliers to have to sell through dozens of unknown labels so they can continue to dissolve them if any of them get prosecuted.
This is not an accurate description of new market entry for .. well, anything? And what are the new entrants being prosecuted for? Is it by any chance unsafe products?
> .. which are of course the easiest thing to fake.
How do you get Consumer Reports to publish a fake product review? Can you point to even one instance of that actually happening?
> This is not an accurate description of new market entry for .. well, anything?
Huawei is a pretty conspicuous example of it actually happening. They were starting to establish a brand and then regulatory destruction was imposed. Meanwhile there seem to be a huge number of other products from the same country with white labels or rotating unknown brands for some reason even though they probably come out of the same factory.
> And what are the new entrants being prosecuted for? Is it by any chance unsafe products?
That there is a difference between regulatory compliance and actual safety is obviously the point. All the incumbents need is for the rules to be complicated enough that compliance requires you to be a massive bureaucracy, or that nobody is really complying but selective enforcement gets imposed when someone undesirable is starting to look like a real challenger.
> How do you get Consumer Reports to publish a fake product review?
No need. Just have dozens of companies produce hundreds of new junk products every year. Then there's no way all products can be reviewed, and no way they can be properly reviewed: what's interesting about a review is the failure mode of the products, which you have no idea about when you have 10 new Samsung smartphones coming out every year.
> [Huawei] were starting to establish a brand and then regulatory destruction was imposed. selective enforcement gets imposed when someone undesirable is starting to look like a real challenger.
Yes, selective enforcement is the problem. Not regulations. Regulations are not strong enough. But they need to be applied evenly. Why is it legal for Apple and Samsung to produce junk, but not Huawei? (rhetorical question, please don't answer) We need proper consumer protection. Any company producing a product should have 10 years or 20 years warranty, and should be legally mandated to produce/sell spare parts for 20+ years (as in, real spare parts, not "replacement motherboard" which costs the entire smartphone).
Suddenly, the junk makers would produce less junk. Maybe there'd only be a new Samsung/iPhone every 5 years, but it would probably be as solid and repairable as older Nokias.
You sure typed a lot to say 'a few kids are going to get the skin melted off their face by an exploding battery, that's just the cost of doing business!'
Notice that you fail to present any argument and are only retreating into indignation at the existence of the problem. You present no viable solution or counterargument to the criticism of the status quo.
Jail the executives and engineers cutting corners. For some reason, you can spend years in jail for cannabis possession or an online post criticizing Macron or the police, but people who actually commit murder and ecocide by cutting costs in engineering products, or who import such bad-quality products face exactly zero consequences.
Then we can't drink our water, can't eat anything from our soil, sometimes can't even breathe our air. But we are the only ones facing consequences while the rich fuckers are partying on yachts.
The engineers are in China and thereby outside your jurisdiction. Likewise the executives of the company that actually makes the thing. The only people in your jurisdiction are tangentially related intermediaries with no real knowledge or control over the product. It's essentially proposing to punish FedEx for shipping a package or PayPal for doing a funds transfer if unbeknownst to them the vendor's product is of low quality. It's desperate and ineffective, because how is the generic transportation/warehousing/payments company supposed to tell if any of a million randos' products are junk?
I can assure you many companies pushing junk are based here in France. Actual manufacturing may take place in China for many products, but Decathlon, Leroy Merlin and Carrefour certainly have executives and engineers here. Those executives and engineers pushing negative externalities to local consumers on one side, and to producers with bad social/ecological standards in foreign lands.
To be clear, i'm not against foreign products. But a french exec deciding to employ quasi-slave labor and destroy the environment on the other side of the world to maximize profits should 100% be jailed. That's already technically a crime.
> i just don't understand why only Temu is being held responsible of the entire broken capitalist system
They are not really. If one of the big brand shop is found importing stuff with fake certificate, they’ll experience the same thing. One of the advantage of the stores you mention is that they have a procedure for recalls, and their responsibility is on the line if they sell faulty goods. Good luck getting anything from Temu or AliExpress in the same situation (at least Amazon is very good with this).
So, then again, i'm not defending Temu. That being said, i doubt my local supermarkets face any kind of consequences. I mean, i just have to look at the AMAZING list of industrial scandals here in Europe over the last 30 years to know consequences are zero: mad cow, horse meat scandal, Volkswagen emissions, Uber claiming to not be an employer, Nestlé's "mineral" water, Mediator scandal, 2008 subprime crisis, France Télécom management/suicide scandal, etc etc.
I can't name a single executive that was jailed over this period here in France. Yet if the law was applied justly thousands of executives and engineers would rot in jail and the world would arguably be a much better place because it would provide incentives for companies to actually behave and not destroy our planet and livelihoods. So are companies really taking responsibility for the lives they destroy? Not so sure.
Common sense? What sort of common sense allows you to remotely assess the safety and build of a product? Even if you get a charger in your hand, can you tell?
Can your family? How about your neibhbors? Does anyone you know have this ability?
There is no common sense to be had here. There are people with more specialized information that I have that look into this. There are laws to address this - and I'm pretty sure these laws were written with the blood of folks killed by faulty products.
It's so cheaper that you can buy 2, disassemble one and inspect the electronic (spot thermometer and a cheap ESR tester). it's a charger not a nuclear power plant !
If you ban Temu chargers, people will go to stores to buy the cheapest ones which are identical to the ones on Temu, just for 10x the price.
Edit: Reply to Scroll_Swe as I am rate-limited to posting new comments. The chargers in budget stores are identical to Temu chargers are are frequently recalled.
At least in the UK, the main high-street retailers will only stock goods from reputable brands with a (relatively) decent track record and safety standards. I don't believe there is any intersection between products sold on Temu and e.g. Argos, John Lewis.
Not in The Netherlands. Plenty of stores that stock chargers identical to the ones on AliExpress and Temu. Action, Big Bazar, SoLow.
Edit: Reply to lozenge as I am still rate-limited by HN. Some of them get recalled, the vast majority of them are still being sold and could burn your house down.
This talking point is everywhere in this thread. But bear in mind that you have no clue whether two chargers (for example) are the same without disassembling them and checking. Noname Chinese manufacturers are very good at producing things that are superficially similar to other things. It does not mean that two widgets that look similar actually are.
The main difference with most physical stores is that those will accept responsibility for the stuff they sell, because otherwise regulations would put them out of business.
No, dollar store is a rank above the rankest shit from Temu.
There’s name brand (Apple, Anker, etc → made in China but made well), then there’s off-brand (cheaper than above but still made decently), then store-brand (Harbor Freight and friends, too; cheaper but still functional, not quite as nice), then dollar-store brand (barely functional but usually still “safe”), then Temu-shit (often not fit for purpose and fake certifications, actually dangerous).
A major retailer in my country had to recall thousands of units of kids kinetic sand because it contained asbestos. Are you saying we'd be better off had they not been made to recall these? Or that we'd be worse off had there been more regulation preventing kids from inhaling asbestos in the first place?
Then, that marketplace has no viable business. Society does not owe them anything. Seriously, if your business model requires you to sell illegal stuff, then your company does not deserve to survive. That’s the basics of regulation.
You're assuming the conclusion. Why is it the marketplace platform who should be the police? Should banks have to audit your life before you can open a bank account? Should you be unable to transact with anyone if you're not rich enough for them to justify that expense?
It's not Walmart you're proposing to unperson here.
The sellers are in practice anonymous, and the consumer facing Temu (or Shein, or Aliexpress, etc) very much markets to consumers, yet shirk any responsibility. They are Walmart but ignore the little accountability Walmart faces.
Of course Temu is responsible for things I buy in the Temu app, and pay Temu for, which then Temu ships to me.
> The sellers are in practice anonymous, and the consumer facing Temu (or Shein, or Aliexpress, etc) very much markets to consumers, yet shirk any responsibility. They are Walmart but ignore the little accountability Walmart faces.
They are not Walmart.
> Of course Temu is responsible for things I buy in the Temu app, and pay Temu for, which then Temu ships to me.
If you send money to someone in the PayPal app, are they responsible for what you bought? Not just for giving you a refund; for having liability if your house burns down. If the seller keeps their inventory in a rented space, should you be able to sue their landlord? If FedEx delivers a package to you, are they responsible for the regulatory compliance of what's inside?
Consider what would happen if you did that. Could a normal person buy or sell something or rent space or send packages, if the intermediary had to take on liability for anything you do with it?
It's all fun and games until your neighbour in a terraced house or apartment building unwittingly starts an uncontrollable battery fire. Electric scooters and those 'hoover boards' from a few years ago are notorious when it comes to that, but plenty of underspecced small electronics will fail spectacularly.
Personally I’m happy to not have to perform that level personal due diligence for all aspects of my consumption and engagement with society and to instead pay more to reduce my risk via regulation, even if that’s less effective.
And I think that sentiment is significantly more representative of the populace outside of some edge cases around speech and vices. The vast majority of people do not want to have to investigate if their food has too much rat shit in it. They want the rat shit out of the meat or the meat not to be on the shelves.
How can you be sure? How can you get the information to know whether or not your children's toys, your medicines, your electic equipment, wall paint, food, and everything else you consume or use is safe?
You can't. So... abstain from everything? Make everything yourself - how will you have time with a job? Will you know the food you grow is safe and that your ground isn't polluted with things you can't test for at home? How about the equipment used to make that food - is the metal in that plow made of lead? Is the engine on the tractor safe?
Your due diligence is only possible because other people - usually with specialized education and/or experience - have made laws and standards to keep you safe. You don't have to personally check everything.
You are believing a lie, then, and seem to have missed the point.
You simply cannot have the knowledge to know if everything is safe - no matter what your specialty, there are things you'll have to just trust others for safety. Sure, you might buy a lead test kit that someone else has made, but the only way to know that the test kit works is to monitor your family for lead poisoning unless you have specialized knowledge. And if you have that specialized knowledge, it'll come at the cost of other specialized knowledge. You can't personally know if that bridge you drive on is safe AND know about the metal in your plow AND know if the light bulb you bough is a hazard AND know that your antibiotic matches the label on the box instead of it being that one you are allergic to AND know all the other stuff is safe.
Everything requires trust in products or services unless you have information.
I used the plow as an example in a list of things to illustrate the varied information you need to verify things and to illustrate that you can't simply do research on everything. Maybe you missed that?
You can't trust the company making the lead test kits any more than you can trust General Mills. How would you know the tests are real, especially without a regulating body to verify that stuff?
What if it isn't General Mills and Cheerios? Do you test everything that comes in contact with your food? What is in their plows?
You aren't just testing the Cheerios. You are just choosing to trust one thing instead of another and you simply cannot have time to test all of the Cheerios in addition to the other things in life.
There are markings that certify that some things are safe according to some standards. You are not in a situation to know what actually is safe or to be able to test it (really, you are not; if you think you are, go talk to your nearest electrical engineer, chemist, or molecular biologist who will provide you several examples of the limitations of your knowledge and abilities). Therefore, trusting those certifications is important, and companies that falsify them must be punished so they stop doing so. It’s not complicated and that’s the whole point of the procedure (and the fine).
That is not a good reason to fudge certifications and sell dangerous goods. I sympathise with your use case, but the solution is not "let’s just import whatever, as long as it’s cheap".
Really hits hard when you have to go to Home Depot to buy 6 spade connectors for $7.99 to use in a project with 3.3V 300mA max, when you can buy about 500 of them from Aliexpress for the same price.
Until you learn the hard way that they are not up to the standard advertised, if they happen to be rated in the first place.
It is common knowledge that Chinese manufacturers maintains at least three configs of the same product, the best one sent off for rating, the middle for knowledgeable buyers, the worst being the 500-for-$7.99 shit for the mass market, who buys nothing but the cheapest.
> The ones which are truly local end up in a "call us to know more" button, no pricing info disclosed.
I cannot speak for the specific part of Europe that you are in, but in the professional Photography community, it is common practice to not list prices and instead have a "contact us" option. The reason isn't a, "Look at us, we're so exclusive and fancy!" Rather, if you list a price for various packages, people get scared off or think they are a master negotiator and can essentially get the work done for free. All of the professionals I've spoken to are happy to work with customers to find a package at an affordable price for them, or at least recommend other professionals in whatever price range they have in mind. The issue is that its exceptionally hard to convey that in a sincere, real way because if someone only sees a price of say $10 000 or whatever, they are naturally going to assume that you cannot possibly get anything for $100-$1 000.
In truth though, many are glad to try and accommodate and get people something that they will be happy with. Perhaps it ends up being 1 or 2 photos instead of an album of photos or whatever, or perhaps the photoshoot is a little bit more "low budget" than a standard one, but there is still lots of opportunity to get the client something they will be happy with. People tend to get wrapped up in the bottom line though, and just assume that they can't afford to capture a happy memory because of the cost - that's something that photographers really want to avoid because (aside from scaring off paying customers! :) ) it means less photos existing, or making it feel impossibly hard to ever show an interest in photography, which is very sad for people who live and breath it.
> Rather, if you list a price for various packages, people get scared off
Yet somehow other businesses manage to convey tiered pricing without scaring customers.
Imagine trying to book a hotel room but were told to contact them because they have a range of rooms from single bed to honeymoon suite. "We couldn't possibly list all the packages, it would confuse you!"
Or try to buy a car, but the dealer refused to list a base price because "we have so many options it's meaningless".
Withholding guideline or indicative pricing is a deliberate obfuscation designed to increase friction and reduce choice.
I know your mileage may vary in different areas of Europe but in Italy and Spain you'll find a plethora of random general stores that resell Aliexpress sorts of goods at a very low markup over direct ordering. The stock variety is obviously more limited but those stores are amazing and fit a really key need.
The ones in Spain often market themselves with their Chinese-ness: "Hyper China", "Panda Bazaar", "Maxi Barato (super cheap)", etc. would be some representative names & signage you see outside.
They range in size from small shops to things with huge floor space.
One thing I've found is that they seem to sell very low quality stuff: e.g. on aliexpress you can buy a flashlight which is built out of metal, has usb-c charging, for $10, whereas in the physical shop, you get the plastic one that takes AA batteries for $2. So they're not a replacement for AliExpress, Temu & co.
Most of the ones I'm thinking of are just corner stores - it's not a brand or chain to my knowledge. An example might be Bazar Gran Puerto, El Puerto de Sta Maria, CA, ES.
There is some validity to a marketplace selling items from a larger range of retailers, however the quality is so poor for many items that it simply is no good for society in any way.
> the quality is so poor for many items that it simply is no good for society in any way.
There are some that are genuinely dangerous and bad for society, but there are tons of goods that are "the same thing but half the price because it lasts a quarter the time" that have genuine utility.
Harbor Freight has basically made a drop-shipping business out of it. I often have tools that I need but will probably use 4 times in my life, and the Harbor Freight stuff is crap but will probably work 4 times.
Copy that over a bunch of verticals and it starts to make sense. Clothing for a costume I'll wear maybe twice, niche cooking gadgets for very specific things, tools to do a one-time repair on a car, a flash drive to turn over photos to family members, yada yada.
I think the dirty secret is that a lot of it is not "1/2 the price that lasts 1/4 the time" but "1/4 the price that lasts 9/10 the time" or "1/2 the price for the exact same product without half of the budget going to marketing".
It's not all of it. Some things are seriously worse quality. But really a ton of the "better quality" is just better marketing.
> some that are genuinely dangerous ... tools that I need but will probably use 4 times in my life, and the Harbor Freight stuff is crap but will probably work 4 times
Forehead hit hood, but I caught myself so it was a "gentle" reminder instead of a concussion. I should have splurged that time I broke a socket tightening an axle bolt. 150 ft-lbs + 180 degrees is a fair bit of torque.
My reaction to this sentiment is that they fill the same need in Europe as Uber did in the USA. They found a way to operate in a market while avoiding its regulations and are therefor able to offer much lower prices as their competitors who still follow the regulations.
Europe has historically had pretty strict consumer protection laws, and ever since the end of the Cold War these consumer protection laws have been slowly chipped away. When I was a kid for example companies were not allowed to target children in their marketing material. When American media became predominant in the continent, instead of enforcing our own consumer protection laws against American advertisers, regulators just ignored it and allowed it to proliferate, effectively making ads targeting children legal in the continent. Regulators have been showing the exact same inaction towards Chinese retailers breaking our own laws as they did towards American advertisers three decades ago. I foresee that consumer safety laws getting the same fate as the ban on ads targeting children.
There is a part of conservatism and resistance to change. Online commerce has been seen as "suspicious" by some from the beginning to the point that in, for instance, France free delivery of books is banned... of course this just means that amazon.fr charges 1 cent, instead but it is symptomatic of a state of mind.
yes, i'm very in favor of the shift towards direct-to-consumer among chinese retailers, but that might be because i'm not actually all that sympathetic to small business
I recently bought some custom-built pool lighting directly from the manufacturer in Ningbo, and I have to say, the sales, delivery, and customer support I received was top notch. Their representatives were fluent in English and competent, the product quality was excellent (yes, I carefully inspected it upon receipt because it's going into water), and the entire process from measurement to delivery was fast and smooth. And, of course, the price was right.
I'm not all that sympathetic to small businesses that exist functionally as drop shippers for the same products with the same absence of support. Much in the same way I roll my eyes and go to 7/11 over the cute "local" markets that are supplied by the same suppliers nationwide, and you end up in a shiplap-walled coffee shop with $8 bags of chips that could exist anywhere.
Small businesses that do the work of curating a niche item, doing QA work that's absent on the shipments from china, and then offering much stronger aftermarket support/replacement/repair? That is often worth a (substantial) premium over wondering if the item showing up in a month is going to work as intended.
There is totally a market for a global website which instead of shipping goods direct from China by plane instead has local warehouses 1 per city and can deliver to your house within a few hours by motorbike.
Aka like Amazon but with much smaller margins.
The savings would come from the fact sea freight is so much cheaper than air freight.
Yea, worst is the retail people who clearly hated Temu/Aliexpress etc because they stand no chance at competing with them when they sell the same things but at 10 times the cost (I don’t blame them. Sucks for them) but instead of just saying the truth that they hate the competition they just make up these fake reasons ”oh it’s low quality stuff that will break” when it’s clearly the same stuff from the same factories etc.
The rules where retail companies can extract value for no added value from consumers? And no the rules has not changed. It has always been allied to compete with importers trying to screw over consumers. Which law are you claiming was changed?
We have rules that should prevent companies from selling broken and dangerous crap. Should I not be upset that Temu ignores those rules deliberately and floods the EU with exactly that?
I downvote comments like this, since they make the comment useless. No-one can vouch for or argue against the comment when it's some "part" of a continent of over 40 countries.
More niche hardware has been impossible for me to find in the EU marketplaces I got to with searches, with only availability from US ebay, and then Chinese marketplaces. Or if it does exist here it's the same used part but it costs 500€ instead of 40
I would bet, 55% chance, that in 15 to 20 years that region will be filled with autonomous farms. Companies mostly run by AI, and labored by agricultural bots. Not an outcome that, even then, people will want. But we rarely get what we want.
Well, of course. Of note, this region in question has a problem with a dearth of young people and specially young people wanting to take those jobs, and if it voted right-wing and populist, you don't need me to tell you what kind of solutions they don't like to their demographic issue.
Human biology is such a horror...I've been through it with enough loved ones that I've been left with two obsessions: a) a dignified way to go when my time comes, and b) we should either fix human biology, go post-biological, or simply surrender as a species and be replaced by AI. I know there are many counter-arguments to the above, but I've come to suspect the integrity of our species' rationality under the savage ravaging of Dog.
I’m not sure if this comment is AI generated but I’d like to make a point either way.
Human biology is orders of magnitude more efficient than AI; that’s in regards to intelligence and processing the world around us.
It is not only more efficient but more complex but yet simple. Therefore, the complexity of our biology is a result of efficiency. An efficiency that allows us to process the world and achieve homeostasis in the most simple way. I’d like to see a machine achieve the same without having any type of vulnerability or weakness to corruption.
Nonsense. Human biology is incredible. 80 years average life span for a mammal is amazing to the point that it should be impossible.
The real problem is that as lifespans get longer, silent chronic diseases progress over the span of decades without anyone noticing.
I mean look at human teeth. Horses have extra long teeth that emerge slowly out of the jaw over time as they get worn down. Their teeth are absolutely massive and yet their average dental lifespan is 20 years, up to 25 years if they are lucky and have been fed low abrasive food. Same with cows, after 20 years they have worn their teeth down and are called gummers.
Meanwhile humans who brush their teeth with fluoride and hydroxyapatite, and use interdental brushes of the correct size for each tooth gap, can basically keep their teeth all the way into their 80s. Mammals with a similar life span as humans such as elephants have gone through several sets of teeth after 70 years.
Humans are built for longevity. If we died at 30, nobody would give a crap about any type of cancer.
Yaii! Nice. I liked this one, and I hope the popes keep at it. I'm not in bed with Faith, but there is a point in life when one must accept certain things. Mine, now, are that we are in a time of cultural decline. Not because lack of access to culture, but simply because culture is last in line after all the many forms of culture-free entertainment, and oh god we have so many of those. With the advent of AI, people will simply outsource more of their thinking and do less of their own. Which means there's a serious risk that we Homo sapiens will cede our relevance, or at the very least, that humanism's marriage with progress will come to an end. That saying that of all things the measure is Man ought to become the domain of Faith in a future where we build souls more lofty than our own.
> Amazon has a really odd viewpoint when it comes to the people who work there. They view almost all employees as “fungible”.
Hardly an Amazon-only thing. In fact, enterprises need this mindset, because people moves on, retires, or just suddenly die. With that said, due to its late-stage capitalistic ethos, Amazon is just too overly gleeful about this tasteless reality of life. It's the equivalent of a nephew coming to an aunt's funeral and shouting "A week ago, I told her everybody dies! And now she did! Wasn't I right??? Everybody dies!"
> Also, last year the focus at AWS turned fully and almost desperately toward GenAI.
I wonder if I'm being too cynical, but late-stage capitalism companies also love profiteering, and the mere prospect of firing all those pesky workers and not having to pay their salaries is like cocaine to those organizations. Which is why I think Amazon fulfillment centers will at some point rent robots at a price point between 2x and 3x their current human labor costs, in the hope that it will eventually make economic sense.
> Hardly an Amazon-only thing. In fact, enterprises need this mindset, because people moves on, retires, or just suddenly die.
Enterprises typically have this mindset. Most corporations I worked for in fact treated employees exactly like this.
As for needing this mindset, I am not so sure. There is a spectrum in between going under because a storied employee retired and treating employees as meaningless numbers in a spreadsheet.
But ultimately I fully agree with the whole of your post. I just had to nitpick about this.
I can't help but wonder how could, Bambulabs or the Chinese government, actually mine that data? In my mind, 3D models fail into two categories: artistic and utilitarian, though there's a continuum between those two. With the artistic side, the Chinese government could find itself in possession of tons and tons of Western miniatures. With the utilitarian side, they will find themselves in possession of lots and lots of random parts with no way to know what they are for. Of course, there's no telling if the next step of boiling the frog is to require users to attach metadata to their models before the printer prints them...
I think you are underestimating how many companies use 3D printing for prototyping. It's not just hobbyists printing miniatures.
To give an example, I had RSI and use a high-end, expensive ergonomic keyboard. The company that makes these keyboards does not go immediately from design idea to an expensive mold. There are many design iterations and prototypes and they are all 3D prints.
The same is probably true for air humidifiers, drones, or whatever other object you can come up with.
If you have access to everyone's STLs, you basically have access to all the design prototypes and something close to the final product.
It's like industrial espionage, except companies are willingly giving you the data, because they do not want to spend the extra money for a farm of Prusa printers.
It's a brilliant play of the Chinese government. Exploiting that we prefer short-term savings over long-term strategy.
This pattern repeats over and over again, from 3D printers to people buying Chinese fitness watches because they are cheaper than EU and US counterparts.
I think you're overestimate the value of these prototypes. The print itself is either a plastic render of the final product without any value, or it's a shell without any actual useful parts/machinery. If we imagine we're talking about the 1% of 1% of 1% which could end up as useful IP stuff, but which might be very hard/impossible to find/understand/do anything with it, for which cases don't use bambu.
You’re making the assumption that customer product prototypes are the only prototypes produced by 3D printers.
There’s plenty of other more valuable things that are prototyped using 3D printers, such as high end commercial machines, or components that go into those machines.
I suspect that getting hold of STLs from US defence manufacturers would be extremely valuable. Why bother trying to capture a copy of your enemies technology, when they’ll happy just send you all the prototype STLs. Even if it’s not defence, don’t you think access to prototype components from EUV machines from ASML would be crazy valuable to Chinese companies trying to close the gap between Chinese and Western chip fabrication technologies?
I mean, if you want to make your point, yes. But I think it would be logical to assume "US defence manufacturers" wouldn't be using Bambu from the start, regardless of what their track record is.
Not to mention, 3D scanners exist. It's well within Chinese capabilities to simply scan parts and recreate them in CAD.
The only case where they might not be able to do that is if they literally can't buy the part (e.g. the military). But the military does not use Bambu printers.
Not everything that a Chinese company does is for nefarious reason or under the hidden agenda of the Chinese government.
The reality is much more mundane: many Chinese companies do not understand the expectations around open source. There isn’t anything really equivalent in China. The closest mindset is that things that are available to use, are available to take.
The notion of copyright -while not inexistent- is not really a basic cultural notion. Even more so, not caring about ownership, and not enforcing the legalities of it, is partly what allowed innovation at such rapid pace in China.
After all, the Chinese government mandated for decades that all foreign companies setting up shop in China had to have a 51% majority local partner, and technology transfer was mandatory. Basically a government-mandated mandatory transfer of knowledge, to be freely used by the local recipients of it.
So the intricacies of Open Source licenses are a bit lost. Many understand the benefit of it, but not the expectations put on them for this benefit.
In the case of Bambulabs, I suspect that, in their mind, they just want to control their platform. They show their misunderstanding of Open Source rights and expectations and I’m pretty sure they are baffled by the reaction.
It not necessarily malevolent or malicious, though it looks that way from a Western perspective, but more of a cultural impedance mismatch.
They are not idiots, but not everyone at that company will actually understand the duties that come with these licenses.
This reminds me of the fights Naomi Wu used to have a few years ago, going to other 3D printer manufacturers in ShenZhen who were using GPL software but would not release their modifications for their equipment.
She had a hard time making them understand and see the duties and benefits that came with using these types of licenses.
> They are not idiots, but not everyone at that company will actually understand the duties that come with these licenses.
Copyright is not some kind of spiritual nonsense. It's law. You don't need to understand how, you just need to follow it. There can be legal questions on what exactly you can do, but those can arise for any kind of law.
Of course you could also ignore copyright law - but that's the same with any other law.
The internet is largely predicated on American law, because so much of it has been invented by Americans.
The EFF, Creative Commons, FSF - they're all based in America. The licenses they write are based on American legal concepts.
It's interesting to see a Czech CEO commenting on (and quoting) and English translation of Chinese law in the context of a license written in America. As he points out in the thread, AGPL is unenforceable against a Chinese company if China doesn't recognize the rights AGPL is predicated on.
I would have guessed as much. I don’t understand why the west allows Chinese firms to act on their contracts a law when interacting with their markets. There is no reason to allow Bamboo to continue selling in North America or Europe if they’re out of compliance here. Sales can be blocked until compliance with local laws.
Companies are not moral. They will only follows laws when they are enforceable either thru the law, or thru social blowback. That’s not a chinese vs western thing, western companies are just as happy to ignore the law when they can - it’s just western IP frameworks are historically better enforced (socially and legally) in the west.
I'm not sure it's so innocent. Bambu labs is a major company that hires grads out of top US schools. I'm pretty sure they have lots of people there who understand the concept of open source, including the license requirements, and who would have been raising these questions internally.
> The reality is much more mundane: many Chinese companies do not understand the expectations around open source.
Except that Bambu is not a small player in the game, and they made threats of using the DMCA which shows they are fully aware of "western" IP law and the nature of licenses, Open or otherwise.
Aren't you saying the same thing as parent? The expectation is usually NOT to send DMCA notices, so if they do, doesn't that also allude to what parent said, that they don't understand the expectations around open source?
They understood enough to know that they could not claim a license violation but invoking the DCMA, specifically the part about bypassing digital locks, they could intimidate a developer.
American lawmakers and politicians are technologically ignorant, and Americans in general see programmers as existing on a spectrum with boring nerds on one end and hackers on the other. Bambu was betting on easy support by painting the developer as a hacker who was "reverse engineering" their "safety features". What Bambu failed to understand is that the people who make and use Open software are not average Americans, they are tech savvy, interested, and loud.
> The closest mindset is that things that are available to use, are available to take.
Apparently until someone finds the things you make available to use and uses them to circumvent your own forced limitation on the product.
Sending cease and desists to developers using AGPL code has nothing to do with any mindset other than bold faced greed. While China has been the source of many ancient inventions, I doubt they invented greed.
It's just good business. They know intellectual property is only meaningfully enforced outside China against entities outside China, why wouldn't they use that competitive advantage? I don't buy they are clueless about that, BambuLabs is built for global distribution, they know what they're doing. They may play dumb about the issue (because that's good PR practice), but they'll have decided they can ignore that license and they'll be right in the long run.
Sorry, but this is just horse shit. I grew up in Soviet Union and we "didn't understand" open source, IP etc either. It wasn't because of some cultural or whatever reasons, it was purely by economical and political reasons. We didn't have money to buy any software. When I got my first ZX Spectrum clone in 1990, any game would cost me my monthly salary, university I worked for ran stolen SCO because it was illegal even to have in Soviet Union etc etc. And of course everyone was used to steal anyway and it was even more acceptable to steal from them. But it took only a decade and all this stuff was left behind.
And Chinese government and companies clearly understand Open Source. They support open licenses, standardsm, software and hardware wherever it benefits them – mostly by making western competitors relying on IP and licensing weaker.
There are cultural differences in attitudes toward individual ownership of IP under communism. It is a recent change for China firms to bother getting international patents and trademarks.
Naomi Wu made herself notable in media, and in China "the nail that sticks out gets hammered down". Unfortunate, as she seemed like a real entrepreneurial leader with skill. =3
And who was it that put her in that situation? An American Journalist that didn't respect boundaries even after it was made clear to them that this would cause issues for her in China.
> Vice published a profile on Wu that included personal details regarding her sexual orientation, which she had explicitly asked them to keep off the record out of fear of state censorship and government retaliation in China.
only because China is at a point where they are producing technology and they don't want others stealing from them like they've been stealing for years
In every Bambu thread lately the assumption is that these battles are about regaining local access, but this whole battle started over trying to get Bambu Network cloud access back into OrcaSlicer.
This is the first three lines of the FULU fork of OrcaSlicer from Louis Rossmann:
> This version of OrcaSlicer restores full BambuNetwork support for Bambu Lab printers.
> You are not limited to LAN only.
> It works over the internet just like before, through BambuNetwork, with full functionality for normal use and printing.
Reading the comment sections are confusing because so many people without Bambu printers have assumed the battle is going the other way, with users fighting to not use Bambu’s cloud servers.
Your comment is close to getting to the root of why the arguments are getting weird: The Chinese government isn’t interested in scooping up all of the trinkets being printed. Anyone using a Bambu printer for anything sensitive was already using LAN mode or SD card for printing. The users fighting for this wanted to go back to sending their prints through the cloud for convenience.
> Anyone using a Bambu printer for anything sensitive was already using LAN mode or SD card for printing
I'd like to just highlight that this may soon no longer be (legally) possible thanks to state legislation. At least in California, see: https://eff.org/3DPrintCA
I encourage folks to share this and the NY campaigns (eff.org/3DPrintNY), as this new surveillance does put people/industries relying on 3D printers at risk
I was curious about this as well. Hypothetically, if they are really trying to extract insight, they could be:
- Industrial trend pattern: even if only people accidentally leave the Cloud Feature on initially, there could be some that slip through. It could be product categories way before the public knows about it.
- Defence and aerospace: obviously less likely, but if people use Strava in odd locations, and people share classified defence info on War Thunder, then it wouldn’t surprise me if someone slipped something through.
It wouldn’t surprise me if such automated analysis is setup somewhere in China.
In general, the PRC government will install local politically connected members into advisor roles in almost all large companies. It is something a lot of businesses simply have no control over in that country, or in the US for that matter.
The locked ecosystem posture is simply because with a billion people a firm of any size always has irrational competitors/cloners. Sometimes the governments national policy aligns with a firm, but the support always comes at a price for every business owner. Communism is certainly different with subsidized labor pools, and worker support obligations.
Both China and the US governments engage in trade policy/intelligence shenanigans to try to position themselves for whats more than fair.
Global businesses must learn there is no difference between feigned incompetence, and real negligence. As a small firm most simply can't afford to defend themselves legally if targeted, and vastly undervalue why QA checkpoint roles are important. =3
"Some agencies" covertly installing equipment at, what, 3 companies (at most) out of the millions in the country is categorically different than overt and widespread installation of party members into high-ranking roles in hundreds/thousands of companies.
Claiming that these are remotely comparable is either pure ignorance or blatant propaganda. Any sane person can see that these aren't in the same universe of things.
Yeah, that link isn't relevant to anything. You're just throwing out random garbage because your argument is invalid and you know it.
You're a propagandist.
Fortunately, the vast majority of people that I've talked to don't fall for this line of fallacy - I'm just making sure your lies don't fool those that happen to overlook them.
> means one has chosen to be part of the despotism problem
Yeah, this is unhinged. You need to up your propaganda training and/or change the LLM you're using to generate comments - this generally discredits your account extremely quickly.
One has a right to believe whatever they like, but most people already know the "Detect, Deny, Degrade, Disrupt, Destroy, Deceive" rhetoric you are spouting.
I for one praise our glorious leader. Have a wonderful day. =3
> One has a right to believe whatever they like, but most people already know the "Detect, Deny, Degrade, Disrupt, Destroy, Deceive" rhetoric you are spouting.
With every clinically insane statement you make, you're just continuing to undermine the positions you're trying to fallaciously support. You know that, right? The average HN reader is pretty smart. They can see that statements like
> ad hominem rhetoric means one has chosen to be part of the despotism problem
...are not made by individuals who are both sane and honest (i.e. not sane propagandists).
I know I can't convince you of anything - these rebuttals are just to expose how hollow this pro-CCP propaganda is to other readers on HN. And every unhinged message just brings your position further into the disinfecting sunlight of reason.
An LLM spamming users is against YC site usage policy. Note it is very common for congress members to end up at large firms. Have a great day, and maybe a walk outside will cheer you up more than gas-lighting people. =3
Yes, which is why you're likely the one breaking HN's policy. I'm actually making coherent points. Your messages are as incoherent and nonsensical as primitive text-generation models - very characteristic of LLMs, that can't actually use logic correctly, and just...make up stuff.
Yet another self-discrediting post for all HN to see. By all means, continue.
One is free to send a FOIA request for oversight activities by ODNI regarding embedded agent activities within corporations, and a detailed explanation of why these folks activity is usually protected by law.
Inferring these folks don’t matter is delusional propaganda. Yawn... Good bye. =3
Wow, the LLM actually went in a loop! I can copy-paste my response almost unmodified from the top of the thread:
Installation of embedded agents into a handful of companies (at most) out of the millions in the country is categorically different than overt and widespread installation of party members into high-ranking roles in hundreds/thousands of companies.
Claiming that these are remotely comparable is either pure ignorance or blatant propaganda. Any sane person can see that these aren't in the same universe of things.
Let me know when you're out of your loop (this is the third time your LLM has responded with "Have a great day" or "good bye" without stopping) and actually read the comments you're replying to and turn on your brain to reply.
Or don't - if anyone in the future comes to read this thread, your comments will completely destroy any shred of inclination they might have to believing your points.
They control supply and demand... and the US just found out their rare earth supply chain is insecure.
Japan has been dealing with their neighbors policies for years. And developed national state mineral reserves to mitigate political weather changes. =3
I'm building a prototype chemical vapor deposition system in a space with strong Chinese interest and activity. I picked Prusa 3D machines over Bambu because of the potential for losing critical proprietary IP with Bambu. Can't take the chance.
There are companies that run lots of machines in parallel and use them to print their products. They could steal these designs and use them to create copycats
> Of course, there's no telling if the next step of boiling the frog is to require users to attach metadata to their models before the printer prints them...
Custom firmware is always a thing for these printers.
During the last few years, I’ve been exploring Svealand, the central part of Sweden that contains Stockholm and some other provinces. The region contains many historical places, but I walk the countryside, away from the main tourist attractions. What has impressed me the most is the amount of ancient piles of ruble with vigilant, almost hostile churches next to them. There are rock paintings from prehistoric times still around, and many, many mounds and graves from the bronze and iron age, the region is literally littered with them. But I’ve never found a single extant statue nor statuette nor depiction of the old Norse gods.
the reason you do not find them is that they were purposefully destroyed in "iconoclasm" -- the battles were so bloody that the Christian victors not only converted the conquered but also destroyed all traces of their cultural practices.
Just south of there is the famous tree of Boniface ?
First of all, you're confusing different events: iconoclasm was the destruction of Christian icons, by Christians who thought that practice was idolatrous.
> the battles were so bloody that the Christian victors not only converted the conquered
Who do you think 'conquered' the Swedes, some continental Frenchman? Their own kings converted, and thereafter converted their countrymen. And the first such Christian king, Olof Skötkonung, inherited the throne -- he didn't conquer it.
I put the word "iconoclasm" in quotes because yes, you are right in a strict sense, but over time the word was broadened..
> Who do you think 'conquered' the Swedes
How can this written exchange now bring light to the subject?
I would say, infighting among fierce raiders was vanquished by organized and better equipped men to establish Nations. Tribal one-upmanship was/is rampant. I am touching a complicated topic over very long time periods. The educated Danes I know, do study French and Latin, actually.. but this is now and quite a lot of Danes moved to the USA a hundred years ago.
You’re pattern matching something like the Saxon Wars under Charlemagne. In this case missing idols probably owe more to wood not surviving a millennium in Swedish soil + converts destroying their own former cult objects.
When western politicians and media lectures the world on human rights, I can't help but wonder how funny it is that because westerners front loaded their genocidal violence, they now get to feel superior to others that didn't completely wipe out the conquered.
Cool as they are (very), I'm not enthusiastic about the Flipper Zero form factor, nor the Flipper One's, though I understand that's because I'm not their target audience.
However, I applaud their goal of opening up things in the ARM world. I'm still bitter after failing to use and having to discard an Arduino Giga. I wanted it because of its juicy CPU, but boy ARM hates hackers with small pockets. STM32CubeProgrammer will raise its nose in disdain if you do not use one of the purebreed and expensive dongles it approves. For my current project, I'm honestly considering to link several ESP32-xx as if I were crafting an old Nintendo, even if a single Cortex M7 would more than have enough power for what I need.
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In a saner society, jobs would be the measure of how we are mutually useful and bound to each other, and UBI would be there so that people are not coerced with freezing and starvation into doing things. But, when was the last time people got to negotiate the social contract at such a deep level? The French Revolution? Maybe the Bolsheviks? If we could, would we be able to do a good job of setting up something like that? When one remembers that the biggest democracy on the planet keeps electing Trump, one loses hope.
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