OT: The hidden cost of cheap Chinese products

We've all marvelled from time to time as to how the Chinese can sell their stuff so incredibly cheap to us here in the West. Here's one possible explanation:

formatting link

--
"When constituencies are small their elected representatives must concern themselves with  
the local interests of their constituents. When political representatives are distant and  
 Click to see the full signature
Reply to
Cursitor Doom
Loading thread data ...

I doubt that explains the low Chinese PCB costs.

--
 Thanks, 
    - Win
Reply to
Winfield Hill

Winfield Hill wrote in news:qtp93501341 @drn.newsguy.com:

What it is is that we shipped all of our chip manufacturing to HK decades ago, and that spurred growth, and that grew, and now they are so huge that those chip houses are actually old houses that got abandoned by a big players ugrading to a new facility. So many places like that in fact that some of those places became the origins of IC chip reverse engineering, where they pop the chip top and examine the build. That was way back when chip features were huge. Nobody does reverse engineering on todays chips with billions of elements each. Same thing happened with their PCB houses. The number is huge. There are probably some huge number of plants over their sitting dormant even.

The ones that are up for this stuff likely siamese together your layout with others and maximize utilization of their layer sheet size.

Reply to
DecadentLinuxUserNumeroUno

You are mistaken if you think prison slave-like labour is confined to China:

formatting link

formatting link

formatting link

John Oliver did a story on this subject:

formatting link

Here is the point of view from a former inmate who disagrees that the forced labour is a form of slavery:

formatting link

If the prison system is making a profit (using for-profit companies to run them) from the forced labour then to me that indicates a problem that has a potential for corruption - the profiteering system business model needs inmates to do the work so they seek to adjust the laws to keep them in jail longer or get convicted more easily.

If the prison system is not making a profit (or at least breaking even) from the prison labour then perhaps that legal system is less at risk of corruption.

John

Reply to
John Robertson

Pop-up with privacy policy of news.sky.com:

-> You may visit a link that shows up as "please visit our privacy and cookie notice". It points to a valid url that just informs you on how they track you.

-> You may NOT visit a link that shows up as "You can select how your data is used in privacy options". The url it points to is just javascript:void(0)

Further sarcasm: "You can easily change your settings anytime". If I can't do it the first time...

Bye, sky

Pere

Reply to
o pere o

ElectronDepot website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.