I will note that Purism do not say what their production capacity is, and that it would probably be a different task entirely to manufacture a significant percentage of iPhones in the US. I’m not surprised that manufacturing thousands of extremely expensive phones in the US is possible. I would be a lot more surprised if they had managed to manufacture millions of reasonably priced phones in the US. The big question is whether the federal government will embrace the industrial policy required to rebuild our manufacturing capacity in high-tech.
This reminds me of pushback in the early days of Tesla. Sure they can build 1,000, but can they build 10,000. Now we’re at “sure they can build 500,000, but can they build 5M.”
I think the answers “yes”, if the demand is there. And I agree with you that industrial policy could help jumpstart that demand.
It's not a question of demand. A negligible number of customers care where their product is manufactured. They care only about price, which is why manufacturing moved overseas in the first place.
What is needed to manufacture phones in the West is protectionism and mercantilism. Our governments would have to subsidize domestically manufactured products, require the use of domestic products for various industries, and tariff those manufactured in countries with lower labor standards and incompatible civil rights.
Unfortunately such policies lead to higher costs for consumers and lower economic growth. It's politically unpopular for the same reason action on climate change is unpopular: it makes everything more expensive. It's no wonder that virtually all western politicians support neoliberal globalism. Goods are cheap, even if it means some of us lost our jobs in the process.
Worse, these policies also tend to lead to war. One of the big reasons we've had relative peace between world powers for the last 75 years is that our economies have become closely intertwined, so no politician or corporation can stomach the economic costs of war. If global trade starts to break down we'll head directly into World War 3.
Personally I think we should embrace protectionism anyway despite the cost and risk. I'd go so far as ripping up NAFTA. American labor standards are so shit that Canadian companies can barely compete, and it's holding us back from progressive policies like a 4-day work week. Ontario can't even mandate paid sick days! I'd rather we have a well-paid labor force than cheap groceries and electronics. Unfortunately no politician agrees with me.
10,000 cars is real manufacturing volume. 10,000 electronic something hasn't even reached volume discount status.
There is a reason we call 100,000 units "The Valley of Death" in the electronics industry. Your volume is large enough to hit all the problems but not large enough to get the discounts.
The fact that they succeeded doesn't mean there wasn't a significant chance of failure at each order of magnitude.
In the past 10 years, it became cheaper to buy the same products from China than the US, which is in part due to US shipping companies (DHL, UPS, FedEx) dramatically scaling down their overseas shipping business.
I could get a 5KG box of electronics in a week for $50 ten years ago. Nowadays, there's only USPS, it takes two weeks and still costs more. Kinda sad.
The advantage of having semiconductor/electronics manufacturing in the US would be cheap land/labor, quantity of labor, gov incentives, regulation waivers, particularly in the American Southwest: https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-southwest-is-americas-new-f...
> Political tensions with China are one factor.
Specifically - I think that, at the end of the day, the economic flow is the only thing that matters and all the other considerations are sort of moot. What the US offers to the world is a gigantic consumer market, and it's quite difficult to actually control a consumer market since any applications of force or restriction of goods flow ends up deteriorating the market faster than it yields control. If the US embargoed Chinese imports tomorrow the Chinese government would receive a lot of domestic pressure to take action but, logically, there isn't an action it can take overtly to actually reopen the US market - instead we'd see this war play out in propaganda within the US trying to force politicians to reverse the decision by causing mass discontent. And, honestly, it's likely that companies affected by any such embargo would just act independently of the Chinese government to those ends - so, essentially, the only real forces Chinese businesses would have to oppose an economic breakdown are their personally contained forces. I think, essentially, that the Chinese government would be impotent to deal with such a situation buuuut... that's just like my opinion man.
Eh, maybe - often that "something else" is capital sitting on its hands or investing in things that serve to protect its own interests.
I personally think the latter is preferable. Not sure why anyone buys US made equipment post Snowden/Assange.
Worth noting that TSMC started building the 5nm fab this week in Arizona and said last month they would build a 3nm or 2nm fab at the site as well, and were in the research phase for a potential third fab that would focus on older/cheaper nodes.
Intel is also building a fab in Arizona and in March announced a further $20 billion investment in 2 more fabs at its Arizona site.
I'm not sure if they've started building or even committed yet, but it seems likely that Samsung will build a 5nm fab in Texas as well, in addition to its existing fab there.
So there's quite a bit of progress happening on US-based fabs already.
I'm pretty naive on the subject, but in this case why would cost of local labor affect which product is manufactured at any given plant?
Lets say employees A and B are payed $50 and $20 respectively for each product they manufacture. If employee A manufactures product X, which is sold for $100, and employee B manufactures product Y, which is sold for $50, the company makes a net profit of $80 ($150 revenue - $70 manufacturing costs). If employee A makes product Y instead and employee B makes product X, the net profit is still $80. Is there something I'm failing to take into account here?
Problems with scaling production also are more complex than just labor cost, especially when starting up.
(Edit: I'm leaving this paragraph here as it attracted comments that would no longer make sense if I edited/removed, but it was a result of a flawed premise [bad math in my head]) That seems a significant premium over the actual cost differential, but they self-admit "this is for customers who have hard requirements on sourcing" rather than "this is what it costs to make something in the US".
If I had been told that I was going to get a developer device, that would have been one thing, but I (and many others) were sold the LibreM as a consumer device, and it's just not.
Along with that, there are reports of how working within the company was, such as this one:
https://jaylittle.com/post/view/2019/10/the-sad-saga-of-puri...
... which paints an extremely negative picture of the internal working of the company.
Between feeling ripped off for my purchase and hearing how terrible working with them was, I'd have a hard time buying any new products from Purism.
It's huge and because of that, it's not in the same category as a normal phone. If it had been sold as that, that would be one thing, but it wasn't.
I bought an MNT Reform laptop knowing it won't look like a normal laptop- that's fine. But if they had shown something that looked like a Dell XPS 13 and then shipped something that looks like the MNT Reform does, I'd be just as upset.
> usable kill switches
Physical kill switches, not usable. I believe the Pinephone also has software kill switches which function much the same way.
> running fully free software
Yes, no binary blobs is good, but that doesn't change the issue of the form factor making it unusable.
I would be curious if librem will ever release data regarding failure rates of their American made phones versus non-American made ones. But considering how they’re branding this and the kind of person who will spend the premium to buy it, I doubt they will ever say anything.
Also after the Snowden revelations, I laugh at the idea that American made products are somehow more “secure”. Sure we (as in US intelligence community) think China puts back doors in things but from the Snowden revelations we KNOW that American companies like Cisco puts backdoor into things.
There are many people in the US who would pay more for a phone made in the US. It isn't just military/govt. Although, they are not the majority.
I got into electronics in the mid/late 90s when there was still a lot of development and production in my area. I watched it largely move out of country and quite a few mid/high paying jobs largely disappear.
It still costs quite a bit more to have boards made in the US (unless you get your own equipment) but with the tariffs, shipping and possibility of further issues between our governments it starts to become fairly close to being worth the effort, at least for some things. It would just take one or two lot rejections or a batch lost in shipping to make it not worthwhile for a mid sized producer. Large companies can absorb and plan in advance...small companies the loss may not be sizable...but the mid size company very well may have most of their eggs in the same basket so to speak.
I have had fairly good results with our Chinese manufacturer over the last 8 years or so but doing our own in house QA/Test is absolutely required. There has been very few batches where we could have got away with not doing so.
In our case we are doing small batch production in house while doing larger batches from China but since we have the machines in house and we can order parts from anywhere there is very little reason to not do our own in house production entirely. This allows for much tighter control over the process as well as defect mitigation on the fly during production. The next few years are going to be very interesting for manufacturing worldwide. I expect it won't just be the US who is looking to bring at least a portion back to their country...or to countries which are cheaper/easier to work with.
$2000 isn’t a bad price in the grand scheme of things. But I will be waiting until the software / UI is snappier.
Scroll a little bit down and you'll see the country of origin for the parts. Most are of US origin.
Holy moly. I'm glad that I don't have to deal with that.
What is going on with that instrument maker?
Sarcasm aside, I appreciated the humor they put into that paragraph.
It's easy to see why phones are not entirely sourced from the US when it makes the iPhone look like impossibly good value for your money.
By the way, there is also China-made version for $800.
It is the kind of specs you typically find on $30 phones.
https://www.amazon.com/Simple-Mobile-Prepaid-Smartphone-Lock...
I had no idea! Worth the price of admission. Whole article fascinated me tbh
https://puri.sm/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/purism-librem-5-u... [.jpeg]
"Fun side story, one brand of 32GB eMMC has test pins on the underside that confuses the optical scanner for SMT parts placement, while another brand does not have the test pins. Since there is no easy way to mask the optical scanner of those test pins, a black permanent marker is a quick fix to blot them out so as not to confuse the scanner."
However, if you are interested where the Librem 5 parts are made, see: https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/community-wiki/-/wikis/Freque...
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-27643474
I don't know what went wrong there, or what lessons could have been learned.
source: https://tedium.co/2015/07/16/sega-master-system-brazil/
- ability to extract all memory component to reflash them
- pinctrl connectors for i2c/spi
- reboot of grey bus
- sdr components
Please make something incomparable!
"convergent"?
And while basically noone uses pinephone/librem 5, there are plenty of people running desktop linux (myself included), but I don’t sleep well knowing how unsecure the whole thing is, and seemingly it is not a priority to anyone. Is my paranoia based on facts?
I think the project is awesome, and I'd be very inclined to purchase one, but I can't justify $2,000 for a comparatively subpar device.
The value here isn't in raw specs, it's in privacy and respect for the user, which is a total blow out in favor of the librem.
Genuinely hope they can find success in that niche. Even if their products never compete with the iPhone in ubiquity, having a domestic company with full stack hardware manufacturing experience is a tremendous asset both to the country and to other companies who aspire to bring their own manufacturing stateside.
You would normally expect to see the magic words "Berry Compliant" if the target market includes that. Not super-clear how mobile phones would fall into that particular regulatory tranche.
EDIT: no, my bad, that only applies to (broadly defined) fabric products.
there are already a series of south korean manufactured, Samsung DoD approved android devices for that market. And similar from General Dynamics, as I recall.
https://www.samsung.com/us/business/solutions/industries/gov...
"this is what it costs to ALSO make something in the US"
you aren't just paying to the difference in labor, you are paying for the difference in requirement, documentation, redundancy, small market segment, etc.
It's like bolts for aircraft. I can buy the bolt for a couple cents at my local Ace. But to buy the certified one costs 10x+ because of the work involved in getting it certified.
For prototype quantities (<100), I have consistently seen a multiplier of 8 or so, for the exact same spec (and verified within-spec after receiving the parts).
I don't know anything about PCBs or components, so I can't really comment there - maybe the multiplier is worse in that case.
One additional thing to consider is there are often grants or tax breaks for US or in-state manufacturing that can be VERY appealing depending on where you are and what you need done.
The $800 price point is already inflated so that it can be made in the US.
Given the ultra-integrated supply chain over in China for high-tech parts & the comparatively low economies of scale here, this is almost a worst-case scenario - and the multiplier is 2.5? Surely that isn’t worth all of the deleterious consequences outsourcing has wrought.
Everything I said about the US applies in some form to every other country to some extent.
In writing this, I just realized that I can't do math. I was thinking it was a 5x multiplier rather than a 2.5x multiplier, which seems pretty reasonable.
The Chinese ones were better machined, had no issues, and were 1/3 the price. I weep for American manufacturing.
As with everything else, think through the threat model.
Be that may, but as a US person I’d rather have US intelligence snooping on me than a foreign hostile entity. There are no ifs and buts about it. For folks in other countries, I leave it to them if they are more comfortable with a democracy, with relatively good relations with most countries in the world, snooping on them or a communist regime, which has issues with each and every one of its neighbors.
It’s the US the rest of us fear, with good reason.
Your state is only interested in you. If they snoop on you they're after you personally.
> The Librem 5 USA will have a user-replaceable assembled in USA modem. The Gemalto modem chip itself is supplied from Germany, and we will be manufacturing our premium Gemalto M.2 modems in our USA facility.
For example, from Librem's spec sheet at the bottom of that page lists 2 components from STMicroelectronics:
Accelerometer (LSM9DS1) Country of Origin is listed as Malta https://www.st.com/en/mems-and-sensors/lsm9ds1.html#sample-b...
GPS (TESEO LIV3) Country of Origin is listed as South Korea https://www.st.com/en/positioning/teseo-liv3f.html#sample-bu...
Considering how fuzzy their language has been on the subject + the fact that they never cleared it despite many people asking for clarification + their track record on "embellishing" reality, we can rather safely assume that what they call 'Electronics' is in fact a dumb PCB, and that most of the components are the same as on the regular version.
In fact, I am even highly suspicious when this post talks about "in-house", "our facility". They have basically never manufactured anything so far, they are not a hardware maker (not even designers, this is outsourced too), there is no sign that they have qualified personal for such operation, the facility they have been talking so far was in fact a warehouse with a bit of final assembly and a bit of warranty service (just last month they said they had no personal there qualified to even simply check or fix the laptops motherboard they get from China), and they have zero cash. This is not consistent with suddenly buying PCB making and assembly line tooling and operating it for a single small series of product. The only possibility is if they got some government contract or something like that.
With this company, you should never forget that the boss is a bullshit artist, and that you should take anything he says with a large grain of salt. It doesn't mean that their projects are complete vaporware, or that they never deliver, but there is great difference between what they claim, what they promise, what they drive people to believe on one side, and what they actually do and achieve on the other side. He says what people want to hear, and it doesn't matter much whether it reflects reality or not. For example, in late 2019 he said that they would produce 50,000 Librem 5 before the end of Q1 2020. Well, as of the end of Q2 2021, they will have produced less than 2,000 unit (IIRC). And of course just a few months before, they completely faked the release in September 2019.
Some nitpicks (not directed at you at all):
> When we develop security solutions, we develop them without looking down on the user or thinking of them as som[e]body that we have to protect almost like a parent-child relationship. We try to build a solution that gives them control over their own security.
That's many words for saying we don't have any sort of security measures.
> Because all the code in the root file system of the Librem 5 is free/open source, all of it can be reviewed to verify that it doesn't contain backdoors and doesn't do anything that the user doesn't want it to do
At most it answers privacy but not security. Also, non-existent security can so easily add a "backdoor", especially on top of an all-memory-unsafe environment where memory bugs are everywhere.
But I will give them that they do list basically all my gripes with it:
> It lacks a secure boot process to verify that none of the boot files have been changed. > It lacks a hardware-backed key store. > The apps are not run in a secure sandbox. > PureOS doesn't have shim kernel drivers that do most of their execution in userspace libraries like Android and iOS. > PureOS doesn't have low-level protections such as Control Flow Integrity and ShadowCallStack in Android and Pointer Authentication Codes in iOS. > Most of the operating system and applications are written in memory unsafe languages like C and C++. > The Librem 5 lacks a permission system where each app is required to ask the user for permission to access parts of the phone like Android has.
And unfortunately the answer to these is that there are some distant plans for some of these. Hopefully both desktop and mobile Linux will improve heavily in this area in the coming years.
But from your response (and on re-reading your original post) it sounds like you're actually pointing out that high-volume manufacturers with thin margins have more trouble justifying high US labor costs - in contrast to low-volume manufacturers with high margins.
Pinephone has hardware kill switches which are not usable/convenient. You have to open the back cover to access them and they are very tiny. You won't be able to switch the microphone on when you receive a call, unlike with Librem 5.
Although it sounds like that question may have been borne out of my own misinterpretation of the post to which I was responding.
These devices are nowhere near similar.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Personnel_Manageme...
All of this info is on the FAQ: https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/community-wiki/-/wikis/Freque...
Cessna used the same voltage regulator as Ford. Ford accepted statistical process inspection for their parts. Cessna required 100% parts inspection for the exact same part.
Solution: run the assembly line for the voltage regulators normally, do the greater of the number of inspections required by Ford or the volume required by Cessna. Ink all the inspected parts with an inspection stamp. Now, Ford can use any of the voltage regulators. Cessna can use any of the stamped regulators. Both companies get parts more cheaply than if the lines were separated.
I think the companies have the stomach for more and that it’s mainly a marketing and public relations issue.
https://fair.org/home/us-media-cant-think-how-to-fight-fires...
It's always been a problem, but it's best to make whatever strides to resolve it that we can.
> The US imprisons more than China does
Sure, but it is not currently engaged in a genocide. Standards for due process are also stronger in the US than in China, and you don't get thrown in jail for criticizing the government either.
The US prison system being bad does not make China's abuses any less serious. They are still much worse than what the US does.
And last year showed us just how much due process is ignored and political prisoners persecuted, if previous history wasn’t enough.
Most of the stuff in that product listing is trivial stuff to produce. The PCB/PCBA entries can basically all be ignored, and all the ICs on those PCBs can basically be assumed to be made in China, except for the NXP i.MX8M which is made in Korea
For more info, see: https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/community-wiki/-/wikis/Freque...
That's for people crossing in, and on average they're only in there for a couple days. The current population is around 10k people. It's a problem but it's absolutely nothing compared to putting entire groups into concentration camps. We did that once, but it sure wasn't any time recently.
> And last year showed us just how much due process is ignored and political prisoners persecuted, if previous history wasn’t enough.
It did?
You've got this backwards. Both taking action on climate change and buying American are popular [1][2]. Furthermore I don't know of much evidence that suggests taking action on climate change will raise prices. But you are right about protectionism in that way. That's the biggest problem here.
In the abstract I see no reason that global trade should breakdown if a significant majority of people in the world can agree about labor standards, human rights standards, etc. In the specific, I believe this was one of the major original purposes of the UN, though unfortunately the world we live in remains one in which the abuses of great powers go unchecked because the cost of nuclear war is too high.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2020/06/23/two-thirds-of...
[2] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-economy-madeinusa-pol...
Let's see the results of a poll that asks if people would be willing to take climate action that doubled the price of airline tickets, or that doubled the price of most fruits and vegetables in the supermarket. I would expect a very different result, yet this is what is necessary to offset the emissions in air travel and international shipping. (I pulled this "double" number out of a hat, but it seems to me to be far less ridiculous than your assumption that action on climate change won't affect prices.)
It's the same issue with domestic manufacturing. Of course all Americans want their products to be manufactured in America. But virtually no Americans are willing to pay a higher price for them. Stores long ago stopped bothering to stock American made products next to their cheaper foreign counterparts because no one bought them. What people say they want is irrelevant; what matters is what they actually buy.
> In the abstract I see no reason that global trade should breakdown if a significant majority of people in the world can agree about labor standards, human rights standards, etc.
If a majority of the world agreed on labor standards and excluded the rest from trade, there would be no need for protectionism. Manufacturing would be a level playing field so Americans could compete directly with foreign companies on price. Unfortunately this isn't the world today. It's not possible to compete in manufacturing with countries where laborers are paid under a dollar an hour, so as long as we have free trade with such countries our manufacturing will never be able to compete.
The average American does not want to buy stuff from slaves, at any price.
It's just that if I want to record a factory in China and show people how kids and prisoners are making their shit, it's not that they won't watch - it's that someone in China will shoot me.
It's very hard to show someone what slavery looks like, even though it's pervasive in the offshore supply chain.
People become vegans when they see what happens to animals at slaughterhouses. There are a lot of vegans. The reaction from the meat lobby isn't, blah blah blah prices. It's just to make it illegal to record in a slaughterhouse.
> But virtually no Americans are willing to pay a higher price for them.
This is some really myopic thinking. Just decide: would you pay a higher price to not get stuff from slaves, or not? Just you personally. I don't care what Americans think. How could you possibly say, "Yes, I'm okay with lower prices enabled by slavery." You wouldn't!
I just go and buy American. So I pay four times more for a pair of shoes, setting me back to 2001 prices. A time when quality of life was still very high. Boohoo. I don't want to fucking profit from slavery.
The argument you're engaging in is almost always made in bad faith. While you aren't saying it in bad faith, you're being co-opted by people who are. No CEO or politician sincerely blames Americans' sensitivity to prices for slavery in China, they just want to reap the profits of that status quo.
People aren't taking minor, inconvenient, personal, moral steps to solve these problems because it's obvious that won't do anything to solve the problem. It's irrelevant whether or not I shut the water off when I brush my teeth when the farm over in the desert is subsidized to run a center-pivot irrigation in system in the middle of the desert that pulls 800 gallons per minute. Collective action is required, which means that instead of moralizing we need to fix the incentives. The only incentive that is universal is price.
A few people deciding not to fly or buying produce at a local farmer's market instead of the grocery store because they're concerned about climate change is not a signal that's audible to The System.
See also: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-buyamerican-poll/amer...
Your first paragraph contradicts itself. Not enough customers demanding their product be made in USA is the very definition of a demand problem.
The context was Teslas. The parent comment suggested that Teslas can be manufactured in volume because there is sufficient demand. While true, the demand for Teslas is not due to the fact that they are manufactured in the US. Tesla buyers mostly don't care where they are manufactured; they just want a fast and stylish electric car. The demand is not for US-manufactured Teslas. It's just for Teslas.
I agree with you that demand specifically for domestic products does not exist, but this is obvious. Demand for domestic products is not really a thing in the first place because the place of manufacture is not a product differentiator for most consumers. There are very few ways to realistically control direct demand for domestic products; laws that force the government to buy domestic are about it. You have to create demand for domestic products indirectly by making them cheaper than the alternative because that's all that consumers really care about.
This is why it's pointless to talk about "customers demanding their product be made in USA". It's not a question of demand because the vast majority of consumers do not and will never care where a product is manufactured.
Money circulates faster with more well-paying jobs which would result from increasing on-shore manufacturing.
I think the key is to phase tariffs in linearly over several years (perhaps even decades). That gives the domestic economy time to adjust wages for the higher price of domestic manufacturing and doesn't have an immediate negative result on foreign countries. It should drive foreign countries to improve human rights and labor laws to avoid tariffs and stay in the market. Domestic investors should see increasing tariffs as an investment opportunity instead of a cost, and balancing the rate of tariff increase could be another tool for the central banks to encourage growth.
> Worse, these policies also tend to lead to war. One of the big reasons we've had relative peace between world powers for the last 75 years is that our economies have become closely intertwined, so no politician or corporation can stomach the economic costs of war. If global trade starts to break down we'll head directly into World War 3.
That's why increasing tariffs slowly is appealing; it doesn't destroy global trade by disruption. Countries with minimal labor laws would face a choice; fully isolate (like North Korea) or gradually improve human/labor rights to remain a functional part of the global economy.
I was under the impression that most of the money saved that way went straight into the companies' (offshore) accounts and CXO's pockets.
The problem, and the point of my post, was that collective action can only be done by legislation, and in a democracy politicians are beholden to the electorate. Most people don't want to suffer higher prices for goods and services, so most people won't vote for any politicians that support policies that will have real impact on climate change.
Since you asked: For me personally, it depends. I bought a lab grown diamond for my wife's engagement ring some years back (before they were generally socially acceptable) since we weren't comfortable with diamond mining. I buy free-run eggs even though they're more expensive. We have a community-supported agriculture subscription and we buy Ontario apples when Costco stocks them.
But like the vast majority of westerners, I buy cheap shoes, despite not knowing where they are manufactured, and despite knowing that almost all shoes are made by questionable labor. I even eat chocolate even though it's virtually impossible to get chocolate that doesn't come from child slave labor. I eat all typical meats despite seeing videos of slaughterhouses, of baby chicks being shredded, etc.
Does this answer your question? I think it proves my point: I consider myself knowledgeable on this stuff and it barely affects my purchasing behavior. No one cares. No matter how many videos of slaughterhouses and labor camps you try to shove in my face, I will still eat steak and buy shoes. People want meat, people want gas, people want cheap goods, and people want to ignore all negative externalities. Information is more accessible than ever, and yet like the sibling comment says, there are not a lot of vegans.
The absolute state of Hacker News.
Can you honestly say you don't buy anything made with questionable labor? Can anyone? Do you know that America has a slave labor force of millions of prisoners? Slavery never really went away in the US; you can't avoid it even if you buy American. For example if you own a car, odds are your license plate was manufactured by American slaves.
For what its worth, we bought my daughter a very nice pair of boots made in Quebec. But it's the only pair she owns that I know are manufactured domestically. They also proudly employ special needs workers, which sounds great except I have my suspicions that it's just a ploy to pay them less. It is absolutely impossible to avoid labor inequality in the modern world.
This is a pretty bold claim considering the American history.
> There are a lot of vegans.
No there isn't. Only a small fraction of people are vegans. So I'd say that according to your example, most people in world are meat eaters despite the sufferings of animals.
China is winning at manufacturing not because of slavery. The Chinese infrastructure is advancing much faster than that of the US. I'm sorry but Your fringe view is clearly out of touch with the rest of the world.
