• xenomor@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    It’s amusing to me that the same folks to deride Chinese car manufacturers because they are somehow cheating by getting support from the government are the same people demanding that the US government artificially protect the US car industry by blocking Chinese imports. The point being that neither side actually objects to government participation in the market. But, one side uses it to make better products and service consumers, and the other does it to protect worse products from market forces.

    • FackCurs@lemmy.world
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      26 minutes ago

      Better products? What about geopolitical interests? If China doesn’t need oil then they don’t have to care if the strait of Hormuz is open or closed.

      It’s a nice added benefit that they are better for the air, quieter and have more cargo space.

    • SaveTheTuaHawk@lemmy.ca
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      1 day ago

      People CONSTANTLY harp on Chinese government support of the EV industry.

      Name one ICE manufacturer not taking state and federal money. Detroit took $80B in handouts after 2008. That’s far more than the Chinese government has spent, and the largest investor in Chinese industry, by far, has been Apple Computers.

      So China ended up with a new industry taking the world stage. What did we get from Detroit? Bloated low tech shit boxes that barely make it past warranty.

    • reev@sh.itjust.works
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      1 day ago

      “A free market is self regulating” until someone makes a better product for less money, I guess.

      • Quazatron@lemmy.world
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        1 day ago

        We tasted some of that self regulating ‘free market’ a while ago. Banks were having huge profits from the housing bubble until the subprime crisis hit, banks went into default, and the losses were picked up by public money.

        My profit. Our losses.

      • CosmoNova@lemmy.world
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        1 day ago

        The point both of you deliberately overlook is that China is not participating in a free market anyway. They never played by those rules so there‘s no point in treating them the same way as anyone who does. There is a lot of hypocrisy to be found in politics and economics around the world and China itself is a prime example of that. But a measure to defend yourself from an obvious case of economic warfare is the most understandable thing in history. Your criticism is misplaced and irrational. I mean do you seriously think a monopoly is desirable?

        • AA5B@lemmy.world
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          5 hours ago

          I don’t think anyone is denying Chinese aggressive intent here, just our response. Give us a response where we can get onboard, a response that is more legitimate than their approach, and wecan all be mad at China.

          Or think of it this way. We all agree on all the ways China are the bad guys, but our behavior is making them look like the good guys. wtf are we doing?

        • SaveTheTuaHawk@lemmy.ca
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          1 day ago

          When has the US ever participated in a free market?

          Man…interweb really drinks that anti-China koolaid.

        • Ensign_Crab@lemmy.world
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          1 day ago

          We’ve had of ecocomic warfare already. It was just fine for US companies to hollow out domestic manufacturing so China could build the manufacturing infrastructure that could have been built in the US.

          But now that a Chinese company is building things that undercut a US company, you want protections for US billionaires that weren’t afforded to US workers.

          • CosmoNova@lemmy.world
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            1 day ago

            Are you ignoring the whole subsidies thing on purpose? This is not BYD attacking Tesla. This is the Chinese government attacking western industries.

            • SaveTheTuaHawk@lemmy.ca
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              1 day ago

              USA subsidized Detroit $80B since 2008, and that’s ignoring state graft for building assembly plants. What the fuck did they do with that money, attack Eastern industries?

              • 🌞 Alexander Daychilde 🌞@lemmy.world
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                1 day ago

                Well, it was $79.7B to be exact. And what the US government did with that was not cut checks, but rather, purchased stock in the companies.

                When it sold the stock it bought from manufacturers, it sold for around $70B. When they sold the approximately $2.4B invested into Ally (an auto financing firm), it sold for $17.2B.

                So the money spent in 2008 actually made a profit. It was not distributed to the manufacturers or finance companies at all. Just used to shore up their value to prevent them from going out of business – and more importantly, probably, make sure investors didn’t lose money, or at least not too much.

                • SaveTheTuaHawk@lemmy.ca
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                  1 day ago

                  Well, it was $79.7B to be exact.

                  oh, touche! but that was only after 2008, and not including previous bailouts to Ford. Then, every state, everywhere is paying to either get or keep assembly plants but that does not factor into your selective math.

                • Clent@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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                  20 hours ago

                  When you take into account inflation and the overall market gains over that time, they absolutely did not make their money back.

                  • 🌞 Alexander Daychilde 🌞@lemmy.world
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                    19 hours ago

                    When you take into account that the original assertion was tht eighty billion was given to the auto manufacturers, I don’t think my comment deserves the reaction it got, not a reply like yours.

                    Would you rather they ended up with zero dollars?

            • Ensign_Crab@lemmy.world
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              1 day ago

              This is BYD selling cars for less than the billionaires you care about want to.

              Nothing more.

              If an American company badge engineered these cars and sold them in the US at US prices, you would be fine with it just like you’re fine with the economic warfare against the poor that US manufacturers and China have been allies in for decades.

            • BoJackHorseman@lemmy.today
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              1 day ago

              If the Chinese government is losing money on each car they export, soon China will be bankrupt. It only makes sense to buy more China cars at cheap rates and bankrupt their country.

              Also, there is no proof of subsidy, it’s just made up Western cope.

              • SaveTheTuaHawk@lemmy.ca
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                1 day ago

                The US government has been propping up Detroit for over 20 years with over $100B in subsidies and tax relief, plus every state government grafts to get a new assembly plant.

                BMW is not in South Carolina for the quality of workers.

        • ParlimentOfDoom@piefed.zip
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          1 day ago

          There no such thing as a free market. It’s a constant pull between monopolistic forces and government restriction.

          • SparroHawc@lemmy.zip
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            23 hours ago

            And there never will be. Not so long as it is possible to hide information from the consumer, and any sort of barrier to entry exists for market competition to spring up.

              • SparroHawc@lemmy.zip
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                2 hours ago

                Yup.

                There are very niche situations where a free market actually works - situations where there is no hidden information and no barrier to entry, where monopolies can’t arise due to the nature of the specific market. By the nature of these restrictions, nothing of any importance will ever be supplied by these markets.

        • Damage@feddit.it
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          1 day ago

          China defends its interests and follows what rules it deems advantageous. Just like everyone else does. It may upset you but they’re just better at playing this game than most countries nowadays.

      • yabbadabaddon@lemmy.zip
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        1 day ago

        We should be critical of our manufacturers but we should also not forget China is basically getting its R&D for free by stealing tech from everybody (all do, but some more than others).

        • dogzilla@masto.deluma.biz
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          2 hours ago

          @yabbadabaddon @technology Unfortunately this is no longer the case. While China 10-20 years ago definitely bootstrapped itself with corporate espionage and reverse engineering, so did every country including the United States. The China of today produces its own fundamental research at a rate comparable to the US, and given the structural failures of our educational system, will exceed the US over the next 5 years.

          Not recognizing that and making excuses is the sign of a country in decline.

          • yabbadabaddon@lemmy.zip
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            1 hour ago

            A company in Europe has to respect patents. Same for a company in the USA. Not a company in China. Of course this has an impact. Failing to grasp this is at best naive at worst purposefully misleading.