Would you buy Xiaomi with WP10?

[SumairB]

I would definitely buy it. What's important is availability. It shouldn't be restricted to one or two countries like the One M8 for Windows.

 

[a5cent]

But I do not want give my money to US.
China is also same as US.

Now if I think about this
.. I have live in a cave to do that.

because every tech product is directly or indirectly related to USA and China and no matter what you do, your money going there.

That's actually not quite correct. I've known this for a long time, but just recently found a simple graphic (based on numbers published in the WSJ) illustrating which countries contribute how much to building the iPhone:



So, you don't need to live in a cave. You just need to know and care enough to go looking for this information and factoring it into your purchasing decisions.

It's funny how Germans are usually completely surprised to learn that they contribute anything at all, while Americans are surprised to learn they barely contribute anything to the iPhone (for the U.S. it's just another huge point on the list of things contributing to the trade deficit).

So, sorry for taking this thread back to a slight off-topic point. I just wanted to show that if you care where your consumer dollars go, you can make meaningful choices.

 

[DCTF]

That's actually not quite correct. I've known this for a long time, but just recently found a simple graphic (based on numbers published in the WSJ) illustrating which countries contribute how much to building the iPhone:

That's where the money goes by share of the components used to build an iPhone, but it doesn't necessarily assuage the concerns of people who are opposed to worker exploitation. If we saw an infographic of who gets the profits from unit sales, the USA would be much higher. A chart demonstrating the wage levels of all the workers involved in getting that iPhone to you, country by country, would be an eye-opener as well. Apple is now trying to do a better job of persuading its partners to treat workers better, but only after many years of refusing to do so and making out like bandits; now, they deign to attend to moral issues.

We don't have to live in caves, and it is very hard to avoid exploitative markets when buying electronic goods, but we should still register our concerns if we have them. We shouldn't look for an easy way to close the door on thinking about these things.

 

[a5cent]

If we saw an infographic of who gets the profits from unit sales, the USA would be much higher.

Absolutely. On the other hand, I think that would also be a difficult graphic to parse correctly. The U.S. is globally the largest iPhone market by far. Therefore, and because U.S. profits from iPhone sales are registered as Apple's U.S. profits, the U.S. would obviously figure prominently on such a chart. That's obviously a very important metric for Apple, but I'm not sure it's that great for anyone else. At the end of the day, every iPhone sold in the U.S. still contributes to the U.S. trade deficit, despite Apple's large U.S. profits.

Even then, because the profits from iPhone sales outside the U.S. are stashed overseas and never transferred back home, the U.S. probably still wouldn't make up such a large part of the profit pie as we'd intuitively think.

All that is kind of off-topic though. I didn't really want to make that last post about how much an iPhone sale does or doesn't benefit the U.S. economy. The point is the extent to which China is involved, and that occurs to a far lesser degree with an iPhone than it does with a Xiaomi device. In a nutshell:

Western consumers in favour of economic fairness and against worker exploitation can still make meaningful choices, without having to become cave dwellers. :wink:

but it doesn't necessarily assuage the concerns of people who are opposed to worker exploitation.

I'd say it's a start...

My main concern with China is related to their practice of currency manipulation. It enables China to sign free trade deals yet still apply what amounts to export subsidies and import tariffs. Fixing that would quickly transfer a few million jobs back to Europe and the U.S. , which in a free and fair market, would never have been relocated in the first place. Worker exploitation is the other issue I'm concerned with. China is #1 when it comes to sacrificing anything and everything in pursuit for higher GDP, including their people's and their customers health/safety, the air we all end up breathing, and lives.

Until China changes those two things, I'll do what I can to channel my consumer dollars elsewhere. I realize I'm just a drop in a bucket, but I'll have at least made an effort to stick to my principles as well as I could. I realize it's far from perfect, but I won't let "perfect" become the enemy of "good".

 

[Spectrum90]

If Europeans and Americans want to recover their jobs they have to become more productive or reduce their salaries. Greed and laziness is a bad combination.
As salaries keep growing in China other countries are becoming more attractive for production facilities. Hating one country won't solve systemic problems of the western economies.

 

[a5cent]

If Europeans and Americans want to recover their jobs they have to become more productive or reduce their salaries. Greed and laziness is a bad combination. <snipped> Hating one country won't solve systemic problems of the western economies.

I know you don't do nuance, but it still really shouldn't be that hard to grasp.

I'm talking about protesting an economic policy. If everyone else did the same, it would solve those systemic issues. Grass roots movements by large groups of people is the only thing that ever does force change. If enough people joined a drive to boycott Chinese products, which includes Xiaomi smartphones, and did so until the Chinese government stopped manipulating their currency exchange rates and started treating their people like humans rather than worker bees, it would change the lives of many Chinese for the better.

If being cheap, disposable, and the equivalent of a modern slave is your idea of what "being productive" means, then you're basically calling for the global working class to submit to slavery. No thank you. Economic policies should protect people from what constitutes modern slavery, not drive people towards it.

The only person actually attributing negative traits to any nationality of people is you. Apparently you think Europeans and Americans are lazy and greedy, which makes it pretty clear which of us is all about the hate...

On a side note, I've seen far too many people work themselves into an early grave here too (central Europe). In China it's just official government policy and happening on a much larger scale.

 

[Spectrum90]

The main cause of unemployment is poor domestic policies. On the contrary, western economies benefit from the better productivity per dollar of the emerging economies. They provide access to goods for a fraction of the cost of producing them at home.
Currency manipulation is a tale from politicians for ignorant people. In fact, with the strength of the dollar in the last months the yuan is probably overvalued.

Europeans and Americans aren't competitive compared with workers of emerging countries because salaries are too high. The solution is to reduce the salaries or increase productivity working more hours. The solution is really easy, but people don't want to accept it.
I'm not saying laziness or greed are bad things necessarily, I'm saying they're incompatible.

So, blaming other countries for your own problems is not acceptable.

 

[a5cent]

^ no matter how cheap the products are, people still need jobs to buy them. Anyway, as usual, let's just agree to disagree and move on.