Geely Electric Cars

[Xist]

Tariffs to keep us competitive will only make things worse. Tariffs because they do not pay what is considered a fair wage in the U.S. are ridiculous, but tariffs on sweatshops make sense to me.

I guess that responding to tariffs with tariffs makes sense.

[redpoint5]

I don't know what tariffs on sweatshops means. A tariff is a tax levied on a type of product or products from a particular country.

The term sweatshop itself is a subjective term. Are construction workers sweatshop workers since they have difficult labor and get paid relatively poorly?

The only thing I know is that nobody and no government has the right to impose restrictions on the wage I voluntarily agree to. No minimum wage, no maximum wage, and nothing in between. It's all arbitrary and evil. It doesn't even make any sense at all. I can give my labor away for free, but I cannot sell it at the price I want?

It's unenforceable anyhow because someone could simply "volunteer" their time for me, and I could give them "Redpoint tokens" to "appreciate" them. Then I could have a kiosk that purchases Redpoint tokens with USD. Bunch of corrupt nonsense these laws are. Doesn't matter if they were well intentioned when they cause harm and impose restrictions on freedom.

So called sweatshops have done more to lift people out of absolute poverty than anything else implemented in so called developing economies. After all, a little money is better than no money at all.

[Xist]

"In the hierarchy of jobs in poor countries, sweltering at a sewing machine isn't the bottom."
"Yet sweatshops usually go not to the poorest nations but to better-off countries with more reliable electricity and ports."

https://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/15/o...15kristof.html

[redpoint5]

Look, I'm all for people having more comfortable and safer work environments, and prospering for their labor. That said, it isn't up to me to dictate the price that people sell their labor for. It isn't mine to sell.

The whole point of opening factories abroad is to make things at a competitive price. If we expect the same working conditions and wages abroad as we do here, then there's no point in opening factories abroad, and those places will suffer.

Capitalism, while far from perfect, has by far been the best way to facilitate trade and prosper all people.

Besides all that, if we really cared about people abroad, particularly in sweatshops, we are free to give our own money to them. Anyone making noise about "unfair" wages that isn't giving their own money to those people is either a corrupt political hack, or extraordinary naive. You don't get to say that something is very important to you, while offering no evidence whatsoever that it is.

[Xist]

People tend to be more generous with other people's money than their own. People like to tell me to buy things (that I do not feel that I need), but when I ask if they will pay for it, they act like I am out of my mind.

You know how Warren Buffet kept saying he should pay more taxes? You can always pay extra--or you can pay what the IRS says you owe, instead of having your attorneys fight it.

[Piotrsko]

If Warren Buffett says he needs to pay more taxes, how come he never does?

[Fat Charlie]

Because he's not volunteering to give his own money to a government that's run by people who don't care about doing math properly. That would be horribly inefficient and would reward bad behavior. What he's doing is criticizing a system that lets Warren Buffett pay a lower tax rate than his secretary does: that's a horribly inefficient system that punishes (by charging a higher effective tax rate) working stiffs.

Apparently the authors of our tax code think Warren Buffett is pretty hard done by and shouldn't be taxed as highly as his secretary, his janitor, or the guy who cooked the Big Mac he had for lunch. Warren Buffett thinks pointing out that this is wrong is a much better way to improve matters than simply giving more of his money to the IRS.

[niky]

Originally Posted by rmay635703

We have already had about a half dozen Chinese cars come over the ocean all have been underwhelming with rather severe levels of major failures.
Wheego, BYD, Miles, Kandi, Greatland, and other Chinese companies have already tried selling their EVs here and all have ended up as projects in diyelectriccar forums because of their epic failure rates of basic components

Until they import cars in significant numbers and stay in business long enough to support them we won’t know if they can do better than their other recent offerings here

See, aside from BYD, which is a major manufacturer, the rest of those sound like rebadged crap bought lowest bidder with tacked on American hardware (I literally laughed out loud when I first saw the price of the Zap Xebra, knowing how utterly terrible the "glider" it was based on is, and how much cheaper the Chinese electric version was).

And here, you've got BYD, which just a model generation or two ago was building knock-off fifteen year old Corollas and pirated Lexii... but which is now building the most successful hybrid-electric SUVs in China.

The pace of improvement is very, very fast. China has, in the past decade, started rapidly bringing itself up to global NCAP compliance. Some companies are targeting million mile durability for their engines, and the torture tests and teardowns are approaching what you'd see for the Japanese.

I've been driving Chinese cars since they could kill you if you looked at them funny (which, to be fair, was only fifteen years or so ago), and I've been impressed by what I've seen. The latest models I've driven were within the upper third in terms of quality compared to mainstream brands. All that remains to be seen is long-term durability.