One of my smarter clients (the one doing large scale Industrial LED) got lured into looking at Chinese manufacturers, went over there and a month later his corporate servers were getting slammed by China intrusion.. HE got the message. Redesigned his OWN server farm and security. No clouds, no ISP. Put every Inet machine under Ubuntu Op System.. And then he and I rethought the entire design concept for large scale Industrial LED lighting fixtures.. He re-purposed a large chunk of his floor space to manufacture as much as he could here in the US... And held onto his designs and IProperty.
Tell me it ain't worth $10 on a bicycle or $5 on a lamp if it came to that....
I don't think that you necessarily need to ask for help from China, to get slammed by Chinese hackers.
That said, I don't support IP to begin with. Intellectually Property is that concept that you can control 'thought' using the power of government. I don't agree with that. Now I get it that you can't slap your label on my product, and sell it.
But the idea that no one else on a planet of 8 Billion plus people, that no one else anywhere can ever have the same thought you do.... to me is ridiculous.
Let's set that aside, since it isn't going to change anyway.
So I worked for a company that produced custom industrial printers. By industrial, I mean some had been in operation since the 70s. Printers designed to operate for a very long time, by computer standards.
We had a customer that wanted a printer made for them. Our executives ran the numbers, and ran them again, and ran them a 3rd time. All of our printers are assembled by hand, in our Columbus Ohio location. We went to the customer with an offer, and the customer rejected it. Too expensive. We made another offer, and the customer rejected that too.
Eventually the customer told that if the product was too expensive to build, that they simply would forego having the printer. They would simply do without.
This left us with one of three options. We could simply lose the account, and not have any work. We could do the work at our Columbus location and lose money on every single unit built. Or.... we could outsource. In this case, outsource to China.
We choose China. We already had cut the production staff by 3/4ths. Production was low, and the company was barely breaking even. If we got the job, and lost money on every unit, we would merely accelerate that process.
If we lost the account, that still wouldn't bring work for the production staff, and the trend would continue.
Outsourcing, really sucks. Having to fly to China, having translation errors in schematics, having to deal with supply issues, because we can get parts they often can't. We requested a test run of three units, and three utterly unique machines showed up. From the same instructions, they built 3 printers different from each other.
But here's the deal.... either we built those printers in China, and made a profit.... or we simply didn't build them. We were not outsourcing to China, because we were ticked off that our profits were only X per unit, and we wanted X+10¢.
We were outsourcing to China, because it was either that, or don't do anything.
I suspect that a lot of companies are making that choice. The problem with people on the outside is, you look at the company making profits, and then assume the only reason to outsource is to make even more profits. Like our company was still making money... but that specific product line, was either outsource or make nothing.
And another issue, is that people on your side of this argument seem to think that if you cut off imports, and jack up prices, that people are still going to buy the product. Well I can tell you from first hand experience, that isn't the case. You jack up the price, and customers can, and will, do without.
When I first got out of college, I would go to Chipotle every day for lunch. You could get a chicken burrito for just $4.25. Today I don't go to Chipotle anymore, because a burrito is $7. I'm not paying $7 for a cheap burrito. That's insane. People can, and do, choose to go without. This idea that customers will simply spend more money if the prices goes up... that's nuts. Why do you think Walmart is so successful? Prices are low there. All the other stores with the much higher prices... go out of business.
