- Why Chinese People HATE Chinese Brands
- Fake Rolexes in Shenzen
- Why is Everything in CHINA FALLING APART?
- ADVChina channel on the youtubes
And much more. There's a good lesson there, and it's not just in China, they're only the worst-case end scenario. I look at this shit and see us in 20 years.
Beer (since they bring that up in the first video) is in a precarious place. Since the '80s, we've had some great microbreweries come up like Ninkasi, Big Sky, Deschutes. We used to have good regional beers like Rainier and Lucky, but then they were bought by giant breweries and turned into fake labels. The "mainstream" beers are garbage, mildly contaminated water you wouldn't wet a pigsty down with, sold entirely on marketing budgets and association with sportsball. If I see someone drinking Coors or Bud, I know they're tasteless and scream at hooligans on TV giving each other concussions. Microbreweries are often on shoestring budgets and one downturn can kill them; happily it's easy to homebrew and start a new microbrewery, but it's a thin line keeping us from going dry or drinking fucking Pabst.
We've very stupidly sent all our electronics manufacturing over to China. If you want good hardware from China, you have to stand over them and QA everything like Apple does, and then get accused of using slave labor, which it is (best-paying slave labor in China, but still so unethical it makes me nauseous). Huawei's CFO has been arrested, and many places aren't using their equipment now because they almost certainly have CCP spyware, but it's still the only place that makes most electronics. This is civilization-ending-level stupidity.
We should have our own Shenzen SEZ (I'm not suggesting loosening our environmental or worker protections, weak as they are under the hideous cheeto person's administration; but some tax incentives would be great), and be making our own hardware for secure systems, but even if we could get workers to do it, we don't have anyone to train them. We used to have Radio Shack for learning to make electronics, but RS fucked it up by selling garbage consumer toys (mostly sourced from China), so they were driven out of business by cheaper online ordering of garbage consumer toys. So we're at the mercy of another country being driven into self-destruction.
US physical infrastructure is crumbling in many places, and entire cities like Detroit are unsafe to inhabit, because politicians have no reason to do anything about it; all money goes back to the companies that bribed them into office, while poor people in cities by definition don't have enough money to bribe them (PR con artists call these bribes "campaign finances"; I call them malfeasance and we should hang them all). The culture of "not my problem" is just as endemic here, in non-"Communist" countries; if we haven't collapsed as far yet it's because most of our buildings are under 100 years old and we build over things faster than they rot.
In software, we do it to ourselves. I dislike/distrust most software, because we have absolutely zero quality control; people ship any damn thing, and even these "walled gardens" don't do anything to stop it. There's so much garbage on the Apple App Store, basically just screenshots and RSS scrapers, or recompiled demo or tutorial book projects, named to take advantage of Apple's shitty search and advertising interfaces, and nobody cares because you can't set a decent price. So only scammers and ad companies and loot-box sellers can make money there. Why does anyone buy a $1000 iPhone when almost all the software on it is shit? Google Play is 100x worse, it's essentially nothing but viruses and scams, because Google's not just uninterested in QA, but profits better from spyware.
Commercial desktop software isn't much better, I think harder about wasting $20 on software than I would on a $100+ non-electronic physical object. In the last 2 years, I have literally upgraded two programs (somewhat reluctantly in one case; old version didn't work on Mojave or I'd've kept using it forever, and the new version can take 5-10 seconds to start, with a splash screen) and bought nothing new, because everything new that I try is shit. I'm using a free thing called "LimeChat" for IRC, because Adium's half-broken by neglect, and it's awful, but slightly better than command-line irc; I wouldn't pay for this.
There's some quasi-commercial stuff where "open source" means you can use the tool but there's ways for the corporation who supports it to make money, and some of these aren't the worst software ever made. WordPress, obviously. Atom's in a dangerous position where it's supported by GitHub, which was making a little money on services, and is now owned by Microsoft, who makes Quality Job #NaN. Will Atom get the performance rewrite finished before Microsoft shutters GitHub? Will it keep working? Nobody knows! Fucking Slack is appallingly bad, not because it's Electron but because non-corporate customers don't matter to them.
Free software is mostly garbage, and we get things like the npm event-stream takeover because nobody maintains their own shit, just make junk and throw it away, and then we're SHOCKED when criminals see this as an opportunity.
As usual, I don't have solutions, only problems. I write my own software so I don't have to rely on other people's software. I ought to grow my own food, dig a well, and stockpile guns and ammo, but I'll probably just turn Reaver if I survive the coming collapse of everything.