News
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
view the rest of the comments
Oh yeah, because there's still cars made in America where the workers get decent wages and working conditions ..
Like, I'm sure they don't in China either.
But what's the difference between a Chinese oligarch who doesn't pay American taxes and an American oligarch who doesn't pay American taxes?
I'm sure there's a couple besides if someone's wealth changes GDP, but are there any that make up for all Americans getting access to affordable EVs?
This move is terrible for the average American, so some different billionaires will make more money then they can spend.
Even if you want to make the case it helps auto workers (it really doesn't) they make up a little over 1% of Americans.
Biden is hurting 100 Americans to "help" 1, because even that US autoworker could buy the affordable EV if they were sold here
Hell, isn't capitalism supposed to be built on the free market? If these billion dollar corporations can only exist if we ban their competition, shouldn't capitalists be screaming to let them burn?
German industry is/was in shambles as they allowed an unreliable trade partner, Russia, to completely take over a segment in the German economy (oil & gas). When that unreliable trade partner pulled the rug in 2022, suddenly Germany is paying out the ass for LNG, reducing factory output, even on-lining coal plants to keep the lights on.
It is simply a bad idea to allow an unreliable trade partner to take over a segment in your economy.
Bruh.
Cars are not fossil fuels...
Like, we're talking America here, where people who work in offices drive 100k trucks with an hour commute each way.
There is literally no way that the allowance of cheap Chinese EVs substantially hurts American automakers.
You could give them out for free with a fill up and 50% of the country still wouldn't ride in one let alone own one.
If you mean pickup trucks, that's also a tariff-protected market. Frankly, the Japanese and European manufacturers probably should have taken over there in a competitive market.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_tax
If an American "manufacturer" is competitive, it usually means it's because we tax everyone else a ridiculous amount.
Which would be ok short term to build up our infrastructure.
But it's long term, and because companies know it won't end, they've just raised their prices and pocket the tax %.
Like as soon as Tesla lost their tax deduction, Musk charged that much less. It was baked into the max price of what someone would pay.
It's to the point we can't even say America is capitalist, we've got a few huge corporations that squeeze evwry but of money (work) from the populace and we fundamentally get no choice. It's the shit they fearmonger about with communism.
The only difference is a government (even incredibly corrupt) could be held accountable in some way. Corrupt corporations that owns the only options that could run the government are bulletproof.
Even if the people try to pick the lesser of two evils, they still lose. It just makes enough feel like we did something that not enough try for more.
Hmm. I don't know about that. There are some areas where the US is globally a pretty major player, like pharmaceuticals.
I think that a big factor is that in the 19th and early 20th centuries, a lot of US manufacturing was assembly-line stuff, where a lot of the process was figuring out how to take someone off a farm who didn't have a lot of domain-specific experience, and put them into something more-productive with a very limited period of time to get them going. Low-skill labor played a big role there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_system_of_manufacturing
The thing is that that's pretty labor-intensive and doesn't require a specific skillset, and so it's difficult to compete if you're a country with high wages. Once lots of countries started industrializing, you could do that same work outside the US pretty readily.
But that doesn't mean that the US doesn't do manufacturing today. It's just that the manufacturing it does looks different from what it once looked like. You have fewer, more-highly-skilled employees.
[continued in child]
[continued from parent]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_in_the_United_States
Politically, the thing is that historically, manufacturing was something that someone without a lot of specialized skill could do and still make a wage that was comparatively-solid, and so that's why there's political impetus behind wanting manufacturing jobs. Having manufacturing jobs that require a highly-skilled workforce isn't gonna help if your concern is jobs with a low barrier to entry.
I remember an episode that NPR: Planet Money did a decade back that summarized it pretty well.
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/01/13/145039131/the-transformation-of-american-factory-jobs-in-one-company
That's not manufacturing, it's the research.
And the research is only there because our shitty healthcare system is the only one that would pay for it.
In America the poor subsidize the cost for the most cutting edge treatments only the wealthiest can afford. Pretty much the opposite of every other developed country.
Actually making the medicine isn't complicated, if it wasn't for parents rival companies could make generic in a very short timeline and very low price.
That field only does well because of friendly legislation that, you guessed it, comes from lobbying.
It says a lot your one example of it being wrong, was a great example of me being right.
Thanks!
Yeah, because generics don't save patients hundreds of billions of dollars...
https://www.uspharmacist.com/article/how-generic-drugs-are-made
You said, it is easy and inexpensive to manufacture generics and that the expense for drug production goes into research.
Did you not read the article you linked, or did you just not read my comment before downvoting it? It says the exact same thing in the "Controversies in FDA Bioequivalence Testing" section about the efficacy of the drug I listed as a specific example of generics not actually showing bioequivalence...TSH, free T4, and T3 in the blood are how the efficacy of levothyroxine is measured. Here, I'll quote it for you.
In a completely capitalist market, American manufacturers would be paying Americans less money to make the cars, and if they couldn't find people, they'd move the manufacturing out of the country. Why would they keep a factory here in the US if they could pay Mexicans to build them and ship them to the US with no tariffs (fucked up lobbying and a lousy government has sort of made this example happen, actually)? US auto worker are paid around $18 to $35 an hour. Chinese auto workers average (converted to US currency) $2 to $3.50 an hour.
So you tell me. Do you really want to go pure capitalism, no holds barred, and try to compete with a country paying their people $3 an hour without moving your own manufacturing out of the US? Do you know how many jobs in the US exist only because there's tariffs in place? Do you know that just like Honda, Toyota and other foreign car manufacturers have done, China can avoid most of the tariffs by building their vehicles in the US, instead of shipping all of them in? Getting rid of tariffs would lower the wages of nearly every job you could get in the US. When millions of jobs leave the US, it makes it real easy for a capitalist to start paying less to desperate people, and start thinking that what you're being currently paid is too much.
It's a free market.
And they are taking it.
The difference is that Chinese business is beholden to, and directly finances, the Chinese government. The US is currently trying to divert direct funding away from their enterprises for this reason.
Chinese businesses pay taxes?! Say it aint so!
The taxes are far more substantial, and in turn, as are their industry dictating subsidies. There is no limit to the influence or oversight of the private sector by the Chinese government, allowing them to implement data collection system mandates.
China also follows the principle of territoriality in IP protection, meaning they do not respect the IP of nations outside of the nation in which it was created. It’s the fundamental reason why there are thousands of cheaply made knock offs of most products.
Free for me to take, so open your doors or I bring a warship. Not free for you to take, so don't even think of entering competition with me or I'll call you names and ban you.