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44
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1215
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • aren’t people entitled to revenue of the brand they build?

    Perhaps no. Take the capitalist system at its best - the brief periods in an industry when a competitive environment delivers good products at low prices. That kind of environment means competitors can very easily start producing an alternative of what the other guy is producing and undercut their prices. This is the desired status quo that actually delivers wealth for most people. In such status quo, the firms that make things can only make as much money as to pay their costs and salaries with little leftover for shareholders. Conversely - the vast majority of society gets more things and has more money to buy more other things, instead of padding the pockets of shareholders. This is what competition is and obviously firm owners, large or small, don't like it.

    The fact that we can't make a whole lotta things in (Canada) without costing 3x what China makes it for is a separate but related issue. Personally I think it's got a lot more to do with how much money Canadian firms make at various sides of the supply chains. People like talking abt cheap labour but Chinese labour isn't nearly as cheap as it used to be and labour isn't the main cost in a whole lotta things. E.g. in automotive, labour is 10-15% of the cost and if we assume free labour the Chinese cars are a lot cheaper than 15%. The rest is tools, machines, and parts like nuts and bolts. A Canadian-blessed machine screw set from my local hardware store costs $20. A significantly larger set from AliExpress (not the cheapest place in China) costs $2. This speaks to the profit margins involved in the two screw sets. Most of our industries have gone past their competitive stages and are now largely consolidated into 1 to several firms so they can extract significant profit margins. I think the avg for North American corpos is 10-15%. In China that's about 5% and the state-owned sector which provides a lot of inputs operates as non-profit. Margins across suppliers for a product stack like compound interest and the price grows exponentially. If you have a product that starts at $1 at the beginning and you have 5 suppliers till the final product, you get $1.28 with 5% avg and $2.01 with 15% avg. If you have 10 suppliers you get $1.63 vs $4. The difference between the two is also exponential. The exorbitant profits of our industries make it not only too expensive to make things here, it makes it very difficuly to even attempt anything by people who don't have significant capital.

    So yeah, the answer is def in-house manufacturing for more than one reason but for it to be viable, shareholders have to make less, a lot less. If we get to such a point, down to just the difference in price of labour, I'm pretty sure we'd be able to easily handle that. The state we're in at the moment is def not healthy but I don't think we'll solve it by protecting shareholder value while keeping domestic worker salaries low - a reflection of the high margins. When margins go down, either prices would go down, or wages would go up, or both. Both make it possible for more people to buy the domestically manufactured product. In other words the in-house manufactured product won't be 3x market price in real terms anymore.

  • The next level is getting it straight from AliExpress, skipping the 25% Bezos Yacht tax.

  • Lots of factories design things. This isn't the 80s. The factories are often a complete firm with design, R&D teams, etc. It's what ODMs are and they exist for all things, simple and cheap to complex and expensive.

  • As always the social infrastructure (community, user base) is much more important for the success and use value of a piece of software than the exact technology used to make it (lang, framework, helper tools).

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  • Meat really don't wanna be eaten too.

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  • It's pretty horrible. The more I understand abt plants, the more I'm like - shit, this really don't wanna be eaten.

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  • Mitochondria was imprisoned by cells and forced to labour to feed them. ACAB

  • The upgrade was pretty trivial from 2.7.5. Minimal changes in the docker compose file if your was up-to-date on 2.7.5. Mostly version changes. No changes needed to .env other than going to v3.

  • Or a sickle.

  • FCKGW, but yes.

  • Ahahaha, nice. Loosely reminds me of how we looked at implementing share-to-app (when that was a novel thing) in a mobile OS circa 2011 and we looked at how iOS did it. It was a list of hardcoded targets - Facebook, Twitter. No pluggability no nothing. Our product team was like - if no pluggability is good enough for Apple, it's good enough for us!

  • Lemmy and Jerboa are good enough for me.

  • What is it, restricted access? Am an Android user since 2008 and never had an iOS device so I'm clueless.

  • Wait for 3.0.3 and then the emergency 3.0.4. 😅

  • That's probably coming too. This is the first preview of the feature.

  • Sounds like you should self-host Nextcloud with Tasks and Tasks.org on your phone. 😄

  • systemd