Google To Suspend Mobile Phone Launch In China 172
An anonymous reader tips news that Google has decided to delay the launch of two mobile phones in China after the recent censorship conflict with the Chinese government. The phones were developed with Samsung and Motorola, and both of them run Android. A related article in BusinessWeek wonders whether Google's new stance on censorship will halt the progress Android is making in China, the world's largest mobile market. "The country was well on its way to helping Google exploit Android. Chinese handset makers such as Huawei and ZTE have been some of the earliest supporters of the upstart operating system. China Mobile already sells its own version of an Android-based phone system called OPhone. Motorola is making a big push into the Chinese market with smartphones based on the Android OS. And China's Lenovo has developed numerous Android-based products, including the LePhone. Any undue pressure from the establishment would mean that most of these companies would have to abandon Android in favor of other mobile operating environments."
in Japan... (Score:1, Offtopic)
40 years ago, "made in Japan" meant a cheap, cheerful, somewhat unreliable clone. They had the technology to manufacture, but not the skill to manufacture reliably, nor the smarts to create. Then they became the cloning heroes, making faithful and reliable Western designs... and today, they innovate.
China is currently at stage 2.5, building whatever the West can throw at it, and making gradual improvements. What do you think will happen when they develop an intellectual property economy to rival the West?
En
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...as Microsoft once enjoyed its level of control.
Jumping the gun a little, there.
We're not exactly out of Microsoft's clammy clutches yet.
Re:in Japan... (Score:5, Insightful)
We're not exactly out of Microsoft's clammy clutches yet.
Not indeed. And I think a most important part of this story is Microsoft shutting up and taking it from the Chinese goverment, happily.
That means that now when you use hotmail, or office live or msn, or any of the Microsoft web properties, there is a chance that not only the NSA and the US courts can access your data, but also unelected and corrupt Chinese officials.
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...also unelected and corrupt Chinese officials.
Who apparently are far far worse than unelected and corrupt TSA, FBI, and boarder crossing personnel.
Re:in Japan... (Score:5, Insightful)
The Chinese have one big advantage over the US: their government doesn't need to lie to anyone.
What? They lie all the time, and do so in grandiose fashion. Just because they openly censor and spy on their own people does not mean that they are an honest regime. In fact, that itself is the problem ... by censoring information, they seek to rewrite history in terms favorable to their propaganda, which is by definition lying.
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Sorry, I am confused. Are you talking about the US or China?
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Pointing out the strength of the Chinese in the world economy and making comparisons to other far Eastern nations in recent history is not off topic. This isn't a question of withdrawing from some random authoritarian state which needs Google investment and expertise, this is about getting into a spat with the largest manufacturing centre in the world, without which we wouldn't all have the cheap PCs and mobile devices that give Google such a market.
Consider where China could be in the next 20 or 30 years i
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Are you even reading the same site as me? Read through 100 random well-moderated Slashdot posts to see whether they are "balanced". Each comment exists to make a particular point, not to present a balanced summary of all views.
Everyone agrees that China egregiously abuses environmental, human, intellectual property and business rights, but you don't need to shout "also, Satan is evil!" everytime you are discussing Satan, as if respecting some sort of religious protocol. The point is that "Satan" is becoming
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At the risk of repeating myself:
What do you think will happen when they develop an intellectual property economy to rival the West?
China could simply do that... and on its own terms, because of its clout thanks to manufacturing capability and owed $.
I mean, it is quite trivial to argue that a US style notion of intellectual property is not necessary for innovation. China could just enforce the GPL as the only form of intellectual property right, for example - I'm not going to provide an argument for the GPL as a good foundation for innovation, because it has been provided thousands of times over the past
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Missed a step: US invasion and installation of democratic government.
The PRC will certainly be a major player in the years to come, but unless they can work out their human rights abuses and their stance on things like Tibet they're only setting themselves up to pop like the USSR (or worse).
You can't expect to educate AND oppress the plebs at the same time.
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The PRC will certainly be a major player in the years to come, but unless they can work out their human rights abuses and their stance on things like Tibet they're only setting themselves up to pop like the USSR (or worse).
Downfall of the USSR was caused by major economic problems due to strictly planned economy not scaling well, not because of political oppression (which was already relatively mild comparing to many other dictatorial regimes out there by 60s and beyond).
China seems to have learned that lesson very well.
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When someone makes a move
Of which we don't approve,
Who is it that always intervenes?
U.N. and O.A.S.,
They have their place, I guess,
But first send the Marines [youtube.com]!
We'll send them all we've got,
John Wayne and Randolph Scott,
Remember those exciting fighting scenes?
To the shores of Tripoli,
But not to Mississippoli,
What do we do? We send the Marines!
For might makes right,
And till they've seen the light,
They've got to be protected,
All their rights respected,
'Till somebody we like can be elected.
Members of the corps
Al
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To add to shutdown's comment:
The PRC will certainly be a major player in the years to come, but unless they can work out their human rights abuses and their stance on things like Tibet they're only setting themselves up to pop [...]
The majority of population of any country can't possibly care less about "human rights abuses" unless it involves them personally. In 1938 Stalin had millions of regular people arrested, taken out of their beds at night and sent to Gulag - and even then "the masses" did noth
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What happens when they build an intellectual property economy based on nothing but stolen intellectual property, you ask? It is inevitable, but that doesn't mean Google has to like it. They are smart to keep their treasure to themselves; the more they expose by doing business in China, the more will just get stolen and used against them. China has expressed no interest in protecting IP rights, why should Google just roll over and say 'well it will happen eventually, why not sacrifice all my IP in the mea
Chinese Technology Imitation / Innovation. (Score:2)
What [wikipedia.org] if [wikipedia.org] everything [clonedroidphone.com] was [dealextreme.com] not stolen? [ismashphone.com]
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"China is currently at stage 2.5, building whatever the West can throw at it, and making gradual improvements. "
Citations? What have they improved? Examples, or it ain't so. There is NOTHING that China makes that I can't buy "Made in" India, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Korea, Pakistan, Italy, Germany, France, Canada, Brazil, or SOMEPLACE, better made. The ONLY thing China seems to have the corner on is CHEAP LABOR, and CHEAP PRODUCTS. They've not improved one damned thing that has been handed to them.
Why do peo
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I think you misunderstand capitalism. The aim is to produce something sufficiently good at a price that enough people can afford. The fact that there is probably a manufacturer in the United States able to build absolutely anything you want at arbitrarily good quality providing you are prepared to pay enough does not mean that every other country in the world is irrelevant.
As for those gradual improvements, do you have some romantic image of the wise white men visiting a village of peasants with tools and p
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Backing themselves into corner (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Backing themselves into corner (Score:5, Insightful)
Google is positioning itself so that their only two options will be to tuck their tail between their legs and do China's bidding or pull out and lose all the invested capital. China will not back down they will never let themselves appear weak.
Google can afford to lose the investment. Until someone does make the sacrifice, everyone else is going to cave to China. When someone stands up to them, others will follow.
But not selling in China is no big deal. They're make and sell what we won't sell them, even if they have to build it from pirated plans. What will make the difference is when someone refuses to buy from China. China will respond by shuttering, which will only propagate the intended cut-off: If you won't buy from us, we won't sell to you. Who's to suffer? Walmart shoppers?
The marketplace, taken as a whole, has much more power than any government. If it decides to act as a whole, either they'll win, or everyone will lose with China losing far more.
If Google doesn't do this, it'll be a long time before anyone does, if ever. So fuck China. If Google does this I'm prepared to back them by buying stock.
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China might never openly back down, but China also might not openly censer Google. If China merely blocks all undesirable sites that Google links, well that's how Google finds the list actually, then Chinese citizens see how much they're being censored, but Google also becomes a less useful search engine. To make their search most relevant, Google might minimize the number of blocked sites and/or report those sites as blocked down on the bottom of the page.
"Don't be evil" is put to the test (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:"Don't be evil" is put to the test (Score:4, Insightful)
That really depends on your point of view. It's actually a pretty scary idea that google thinks it has enough power to change the governing policy of one of the biggest countries in the world. Sure, to our (western) point of view it makes a lot of sense to try to give citizens the freedom to express their opinion, but they ARE trying to infringe upon the sovereignty of a country. A country cannot work if they have to change their laws according to the wishes of a company.
I cannot vote for Google, so they do not rule.
Not really it doesn't. (Score:5, Insightful)
This has not been shown to be the case. I'm sorry, but you can't have it both ways. Does Google put their foot down, or don't they? Do they give into the local laws and help oppress, or don't they? I don't see Google invading China with corporate armies, or hacking Chinese government systems, or subverting Chinese government employees here.
No, but a company is made up of people, and in a democracy, those people have a say in how the country is run, along with every other citizen. Perhaps you don't live in a country with a democratic form of government, or you don't value the freedom of each voice being heard. However, in the United States, we do value these things.
But in the end it still comes down to one question: should Google support China's repressive government, or not? If you condemn them either way, you are a hypocrite. And you'll have to make a really, really good case for "should support repression" as being "not evil".
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This has not been shown to be the case. I'm sorry, but you can't have it both ways. Does Google put their foot down, or don't they? Do they give into the local laws and help oppress, or don't they? I don't see Google invading China with corporate armies, or hacking Chinese government systems, or subverting Chinese government employees here.
Well, I'm sorry, but if a company wants to operate in a country, it should abide by its laws, otherwise it's a criminal organization. It's not up to that company to change the government, it's up to the people that live in the country. There are more ways than those you mention for a company to force its wishes on a government (MS has used some).
I'm not saying I agree with what China is doing. But I also don't think it a good idea to force my ideas of freedom on them, if there's anything that causes chaos i
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Well, I'm sorry, but if a company wants to operate in a country, it should abide by its laws, otherwise it's a criminal organization.
A company that doesn't abide by a law is a criminal organization by definition.
However, in a country where the laws are evil, it is the moral duty of a citizen to be a criminal. Obviously there is a continuity between being a citizen of Utopia and a citizen of some genocidal militaristic totalitarianism. I'm not suggesting that it is purely black and white.
I do value these
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Well, I'm sorry, but if a company wants to operate in a country, it should abide by its laws, otherwise it's a criminal organization.
Isn't that what Google is doing? They're not threatening to invade China with an army of google-engineered robots unless demands are met. This particular event is not even the despicable "let's buy some politicians with campaign contributions" thing. They're saying, "we don't agree with your laws, and if you're not willing to change them, we'll no longer be willing to operate in your country". That's the only thing they've threatened to do: to stop doing business there.
Re:Not really it doesn't. (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, I'm sorry, but if a company wants to operate in a country, it should abide by its laws, otherwise it's a criminal organization.
And Google is doing just that - since they decided that they cannot in good conscience (or business sense, depending on who you ask) abide by those laws, they have pulled out.
It's not up to that company to change the government, it's up to the people that live in the country.
Absolutely. But people who live in the country may want said company to operate in their country, and if that company refuses to operate under their laws, change the laws accordingly. I don't see anything wrong with that. By no means this is "company in charge of a country".
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Did it ever strike you that what the Chinese government is doing is against their very own constitution?
No?
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Your argument depends on the premise that the majority of the people in the country support the government and the laws set by it.
That premise is quite possibly false.
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A country cannot work if they have to change their laws according to the wishes of a company.
Which is why the US is in the decline it's in, but that's another story.
Re:"Don't be evil" is put to the test (Score:5, Insightful)
It's actually a pretty scary idea that google thinks it has enough power to change the governing policy of one of the biggest countries in the world
In the words of an individual who did have enough power to change the governing policy of one of the biggest countries in the world in the past; Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.
Re:"Don't be evil" is put to the test (Score:4, Interesting)
It's actually a pretty scary idea that google thinks it has enough power to change the governing policy of one of the biggest countries in the world.
Come on, is it really that scary? I mean we got the farm, auto, finance, telco, and security industries doing this every day over here and we are more scared of the mythical terrorist. Its about time one of our industries (search) starts poking at someone else left with a spine... even if they end up losing a finger.
I think we are all making this seem FAR bigger than it actually is. A company has reassessed the risk profile of an environment and found it to be not suitable to justify continuing operations. Said company is looking at mitigating some of the risk. If it doesn't work out, the company will revisit the _idea_ of discontinuing operations. Losing China will not be that big a deal to Google as the environment was against it in the first place.
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we are more scared of the mythical terrorist.
Dick Cheney isn't mythical.
Companies make a ton of money off this.
Remember those virtual stripping machines that wouldn't sell before the CIA set up the "underwear bomber" to get sales moving again?
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That really depends on your point of view. It's actually a pretty scary idea that google thinks it has enough power to change the governing policy of one of the biggest countries in the world. Sure, to our (western) point of view it makes a lot of sense to try to give citizens the freedom to express their opinion, but they ARE trying to infringe upon the sovereignty of a country. A country cannot work if they have to change their laws according to the wishes of a company.
I cannot vote for Google, so they do not rule.
HAHAHAHAHAHA!! ...
Do you live in the US? Many of your laws were lobbied for by multi-national corporations. Your copyright laws are the result of the big entertainment companies demanding extensions. Your oil companies control innovation of electric vehicles (They had electric cars decades ago, and companies like GM even sold some -_- ) and apparently some people feel they control city design [slashdot.org] too. And more and more over the counter drugs are becoming "dangerous medications". Down there you need a prescripti
Re:"Don't be evil" is put to the test (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, before we get on the love-Google bandwagon, it's equally possible that the threat of trade secrets/code being stolen, which could be passed on to a Chinese competitor, combined with Google's less than stellar market share in China, is a cost that far outweighs any possible gains by hanging on hoping the Chinese government throws them a few scraps. So, in order to turn a bad situation around, they state they're doing it because they object to the bad bad Chinese government, which helps in the PR department, and also applies pressure on Google's competitors like Bing/Yahoo etc. to do something similar.
China may have the potential to be the biggest market in the world, but they're inherently protectionist, and actively protect local industry first. Nothing is going to change that until China is the most powerful economy on earth, at which point they may adopt the "free market" because they'll be in a position of dominance to ensure they always win. The British did it this way, and so did the Americans, I don't see why China should behave any different.
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Android is open source. Some of Google's applications are closed, but they have had just as many problems with people in western countries including the applications in their custom firmware builds, as in China. Furthermore, China can reverse engineer the applications just as easily whether the phone is sold there or not. It is possible that Google had some Chinese employees working on localization who had access to the code, which would increase the chance of stolen code, but it is equally likely that the
Re:"Don't be evil" is put to the test (Score:4, Insightful)
This makes no sense they had like what 30% of search in China and 600MM a year in revenue. Yahoo Microsoft et al. have much much less than that and they see no need to walk away from China. They are the second largest search provider in China you don't walk away from that lightly and you don't run away when you are GAINING market share. So that's just tripe I can't see why people think this would be insightful at all.
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Remember they want to pull out because they're being hacked, and private data has been acce
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Makes no sense? Are you serious?
Yes, Matilda, there really ARE things more important than money... Societal survival, making sure your kids aren't enslaved, many things are more important than market share, and the inhumane corporations of the world are just starting to realize that.
Try not acting like a mindless virus (Breed & Eat, Breed & Eat, ..., until your environment is destroyed), instead act like a self-aware lifeform that knows the secret to longevity is to not consume all, but to maintain
Re:"Don't be evil" is put to the test (Score:5, Insightful)
Sergey Brin, who was born in the former USSR, has more personal feelings about censorship and human rights issues. He was never entirely in favor of doing business in China, but went along with it. When this happened, he wanted to stop doing business in China.
Estimates are that Google makes $300 million to $600 million in China, so while it's not going to break the bank, they are taking a hit from this. If they wanted to do the financially intelligent thing, they would keep operations in China (if they really have concerns about intellectual property, they can keep all that in the US and segregate their employees in China from the US).
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I would suggest that an emerging industrial economy containing more then 1/6th of the worlds population and with an obvious needs for communication is a market where they could make money by the
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Google is advertizing company. Google business model only works when:
a) people pay then to advertize product.
b) people buy product as advertized and make money to a) people.
This does not work for China: Chinese company will pay to Baidu to advertize because it has highest market coverage. China does not import much, so Google can not make business with anyone else than Chinese companies (which will rather make business with Baidu which can actually give em customers.).
Simply, Google business model breaks wh
Huh? (Score:2)
Sarcasm aside...
Google has been generating advertising revenue in China. People have been using google.cn. A lot of foreign companies that advertise with Google get click-throughs from China.
BTW - Google makes money on a lot more things then just advertising.
Just because Google isn't a market leader isn't a reason for them not to apply themselves to China. China's internet access requires exactly what Google has mastered: Search engi
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No, that won't work. Imagine that tomorrow the US government just says to Microsoft to hand over all their user information for the purpose of filtering for terrorists. Here we have the whole IP, human rights, private industry lobbying and psychology efforts to stop that. BUT in China, Google doesn't have any of that with any real power. They would need to fall back on the US government and we know how far back it is willing to bend for a lender (foreign or domestic).
Yoink!....No Google for you China (Score:3, Insightful)
Google should just say sorry China - you get no google anymore.
Although it's hard to say no to market where 100 Million ad impressions is a slow day.
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Although it's hard to say no to market where 100 Million ad impressions is a slow day.
That's exactly the problem right there. It boils down to this: Google needs China more than China needs Google. So China can do whatever they want and Google will always have to either accept it, or quit.
Re:Yoink!....No Google for you China (Score:5, Interesting)
Google needs China more than China needs Google.
But in reality, China doesn't need Google, and Google doesn't need China.
I for one am thankful to see anyone not tuck tail and say Thank You Sir May I Have Another when China kicks them in the balls.
Google's rep and their Do No Evil took a major hit recently with concessions to China, and Google had basically said this is IT this is as far as we will go, and China just continued to push it, and Google has finally had enough and is playing hardball. Good for them, have at it.
Someone needed to teach China that just because they're the biggest single market in the world doesn't mean they dictate the laws that the rest of the world has to follow. In that respect China is no better than a monopolistic company, that's abusing its monopoly position.
Re:Yoink!....No Google for you China (Score:5, Insightful)
Someone needed to teach China that just because they're the biggest single market in the world doesn't mean they dictate the laws that the rest of the world has to follow. In that respect China is no better than a monopolistic company, that's abusing its monopoly position.
And when they've done with that, would they mind flying over to the US and teaching them the same thing?
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China is the biggest growing market. They're not the biggest single market. A lot of people without resources to buy your stuff isn't terribly useful.
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Small correction:
China is not the biggest single market in the world.
The US is still the biggest market in the world.
The Chinese market is the biggest emerging market, but isn't close to the US market, per capita, or otherwise.
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=compare+gdp+of+us+vs+china [wolframalpha.com]
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=compare+per+capita+gdp+of+us+vs+per+capita+gdp+of+china [wolframalpha.com]
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It's also relevant that yes, whilst China is big, it'd be stupid to ignore India.
Sure it'd be nice to have both, but if Google spends the additional effort it spent on China in somewhere like India instead I'd wager they could increase profits in India enough to mitigate any loss from pulling out of China.
The population of India is 1.14 billion, the population of China is 1.32 billion. Sure it's a 180 million person difference which is a lot, but when you scale down to those that have internet access rather
Re: and lose intellectual property (Score:2)
I live near alcatel, and about 90% of their workers are Indians or Chinese. China is digging their heels into large techie companies in the west.
Dumb question (Score:2)
Re:Dumb question (Score:4, Informative)
They have to be careful ... (Score:3, Interesting)
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They have to be careful. After all the android is open source and China certainly has the capability of making their own mobile phones [wikipedia.org]. If they don't sell in China, China could just make its own Android, and use the economies of scale to export it to the West too. This threat is a bit like a Scotsman saying he won't sell his whiskey in Nashville
If China starts rolling out Android OS phones on their own, this won't hurt them directly.
Google isn't looking at making money hand over first through Nexus One sales.
They're looking at making Android OS a major player in the mobile device market, to replace Symbian and Windows Mobile and slow/stop the momentum of the iPhone OS.
Their big thing with rolling out the Nexus One is that they want to start setting a standard for what an Android phone should be: both in hardware and the configuration of the OS. C
Gibson was right (Score:4, Insightful)
Just wait for the first armed one.
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Re:Gibson was right (Score:4, Interesting)
You may have missed a whole series of antitrust cases in EU and US...
That's the point. In every other case of government-corporate head butting, the corporation may have complained loudly (sometimes in court) but never before has one just said, "No, we won't play by your rules."
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A big part of that is not having a local presence - which you can get away with web-based apps (unless you take local advertising dollars - unless said dollars are paid directly to you overseas).
Suppose I provided a purely web-based service (news, search, something that involves nothing more than packets over the internet). I take payment in advance by some method which does not rely on infrastructure outside of my own country. Maybe I deposit checks, or maybe I use US credit cards (for a US company), or
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An interesting fact (Score:2)
I don't know if this is a new finding. I've noticed this today:
rms@susebox:~> geoiplookup www.google.cn
GeoIP Country Edition: US, United States
I expected it to be hosted in China.
Re:Another interesting fact (Score:2)
that relates to your sig is that open source rescues formats, protocols, specifications and standards.
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Download the Linux kernel and take a look at the source. I recommend you start with the Documentation directory.
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Check out Documentation/filesystems/ext2.txt and scroll down to the Specification-section. Nifty, ain't it?
Anyone with the source can write a specification, given enough effort. If you need to figure out how GFS works there's a whole implementation available. Probably anyone who would need a specification of a filesystem can figure out the source code and write one, although I agree that
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the output implies that google.cn doesn't have a mirror in China, because geographically India is closer to China than to US
Or it could mean that if no explicit handling is configured the fallback option is the US servers.
Also geographic closeness doesn't nessacerally imply good network connections between two points.
Mod parent informative (Score:2)
Also geographic closeness doesn't nessacerally imply good network connections between two points.
That explains it.
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We'd already worked that out from the combination of being so often wrong, but yet so totally confident in your pontifications.
I'm certainly more confident than cowards like you. Now give me an instance where you think I was wrong.
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More should follow their example. (Score:3, Interesting)
Let's go back to home-grown industry and leave China to destroy themselves. Our respective economies could do with the business.
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If we are going to have China-bashing comments, could we at least have intelligent ones? That is, based on any kind of knowledge and not just xenophobia.
Re:More should follow their example. (Score:4, Informative)
I call fallacy of idealizing the past here. China has been a manufacturing powerhouse since the 1970s. So 40 years now. So you are saying you want to bring back American factories and conditions from the 1960s? That time in manufacturing was best known for lawsuits, strikes, poor quality control, union corruption, and overall fucktardness.
The reality is our economy (or any for that matter) doesnt work if we paid factory workers 55k a year with benefits. As far as "exploiting" the workforce: Are you willing to pay 2 to 3x the price of your goods for the sake of a factory worker's wellbeing? Well, what do you expect to pay them? Their wages are competitive for the demand of their skills. The guy in the US making 10 dollars an hour on the lathe isnt too different than the guy making 2 dollars an hour in China, when you compare purchasing power of that money in those countries.
Look, Im not some super free-market guy, but using loaded language like "exploited" and pretending that manufacturing in the past was some kind of ideal job is just being disingenuous. The invisible hand of the market controls a lot of this and the largest part of that hand is you and me demanding cheap prices for good like cars, computers, phones, etc. The boogeyman is you and me, not necessarily some big government entity holding everyone down.
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Are you willing to pay 2 to 3x the price of your goods for the sake of a factory worker's wellbeing?
Actually, yes, I am.
The invisible hand of the market controls a lot of this and the largest part of that hand is you and me demanding cheap prices for good like cars, computers, phones, etc. The boogeyman is you and me, not necessarily some big government entity holding everyone down.
It's true, but the problem here is that if one man stops buying cheap stuff, it doesn't really change anything so long as others keep doing so. The only way it can have an effect is when the majority, or at least a significant minority, do so. And, of course, people aren't willing to penalize themselves when they know this won't actually do anything useful, so everyone is waiting on everyone else.
And that is precisely why we have this thing called "government". If the majority of people
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>Actually, yes, I am.
Bullshit. What kind of house or rental will you get for 1/3rd the price? What neighborhood? How can you afford health insurance at 3x the price? How can you afford gasoline at 3x the price? How can you afford food at 3x the price? How many jobs will artificial inflation of prices via wage subsidy cost?
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Err, house/rental for 3x the price, not 1/3rd.
Point is, that even comfortable upper middle class people cant handle 3x change in price. For what? To subsidize jobs that can be gotten by high school drop outs? What incentive to go to school, innovate, and start a business, etc if you can make an easy 60k turning the lathe?
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Bullshit. What kind of house or rental will you get for 1/3rd the price? How can you afford health insurance at 3x the price?
Where I live it's universal health care, and I don't see how its price would in any way be affected by what we're discussing. Most of the cost there is in labor, anyway, and that's already local. Also, how many medical supplies are being produced in China?
Houses/rentals would be affected somewhat because of material costs, but nowhere as significant as 1/3 of the price.
How can you afford gasoline at 3x the price
Yes, absolutely. I already pay less than that compared to Europeans, and they seem to be able to afford that.
How can you afford food at 3x the price?
I try to buy locally produced s
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This is why I'm posting on
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Indeed. This idea works only if everyone is idealistic as me.
Hey, how about this idea. We can all promise to buy products made in countries that have sane environmental laws and which do not exploit labor. Maybe we'll all agree that if we do have to buy something from such a country we'll pay some kind of a fine into a fund used to help compliant businesses. Since we can't trust that everybody will play ball maybe we can pay some guys to oversee enforcement.
We could formalize this agreement into somethin
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And environmental policies protect everyone, not just the workers.
Agreed - all the more reason to tariff goods from nations that don't have sensible controls. Otherwise globalism is just one big race for the bottom.
What I advocate is really nothing more than holding other nations to the same standards that we hold ourselves.
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So would you apply that to the states as well?
Nope - the constitution actually forbids that.
Should they put a tariff on at-will employment states?
Nope - I am not suggesting that every minor difference in public policy is worthy of balancing tariffs. Comparing Belgium and France is comparing shades of gray. On the other hand, comparing England and China is not.
And just who and how are these tariff's defined?
Like anything else - by national legislatures. It would be in the interest of progressive nati
related topic: China ends Avatar showing (Score:2)
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Android with no facebook/twitter (Score:2)
Think of the GFW!
What's the point to have an Android if the facebook and twitter integration is not working? Like all Phone book, contact list, live photo uploading etc not working?
I think the price should be 50% cheaper without these!
I wonder when will proxy supports come in...I am living in China, and I have handful of proxies that let me go over the GFW. But is there a configuration hook for that?
Or could I do something like hack the /etc/hosts, and setup a Apache Proxy/Squid or whatsoever at somewhere t
This comes on top of Avatar in China (Score:2, Interesting)
The Whole Taco (Score:2)
Considering the Chinese government's horrid violations of basic human rights I feel that we should ban all commerce with China. We need an official stamp for such nations such as "Hater of Humanity". By applying an official stamp to such nations we could enlist other nations in total economic embargoes. That would surely slap China hard enough to get them to comply with modern nations sense of fairness to its citizens.
Not made in China? (Score:2)
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Uhmmm, the Android phone is manufactured where?
If you mean Nexus One, then it's Taiwan.
It's still made in China (Score:2)
Bottom line (Score:2)
Re:That'll teach those Commies a lesson (Score:5, Insightful)
You underestimate the importance of MNCs and FDI if you think that this does not make a difference.
Countries clamor for investment from top firms, and go a long way to accommodating them. China may be big, but they are just as dependent on such investments. If it were cut and dry, they would have given Google the finger a long, long time ago.
If enough corporations started doing that, then other developing countries start looking ripe and interesting. It does not take much for a country to go from plum, juicy investment targets to stark and dangerous entities that no one would touch with a ten-foot pole.
Just under ten years ago, the Asian economies were all the rage -- and before that, Latin American countries. China could just as easily be an also-ran if they pushed too hard. After all, even the USSR fell, for all its (supposed) might, and that's in recent memory.
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Yes, yes, yes, you fucking Asia-snob, Samurai are not Chinese, but it still works... STFU.
It still works cause most of our uneducated masses couldn't tell the difference between the two.
China? Yah, that's the capital of Japan.
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Ah, Mr Fake Chinaman, but you fail at the basics of being able to think down to your "competition's" level. Always you must keep that in your mind, if you are to communicate effectively and thus win the great game. // Zing! Pop! Whooooosssshhh!!!
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