I think you’re absolutely right, but in our company this will turn out to be shortsighted. Because we would actually need some creativity to do better in order to save our jobs.

Some of my coworkers show me their chatGPT generated drivel. They seem to be downright proud of that, like they would be gaming the system by using chatGPT instead of using their own head. However I think their daily work seems to consist of unnecessary corpo crap and they should really be fired and replaced with chatGPT.

You’re right that regard. I was simplyfing the matter by only using wages as the primary factor. Of course it is a combination of factors which drive production costs, many of which you just explained. However, the end result is the same: Building products on shore is expensive. Someone has to pay the price.

I remember last time Trump was in office. There were massive tariffs on european products as well. There are no communist countries in the European Union. Trump and his gang openly push the “America first” narrative and that very obviously means that every other country in the global market is under attack, even those who were traditionally viewed as allies. Communism is not the issue here.

We’ll see if the US manages to bully the world into submission but I have my doubts. A free global market is bound by capitalist mechanics. If the US is not an attractive trade partner the export profits will be made elsewhere.

I very much doubt that tariffs and pissing off basically everyone outside if the US will help a goal of a global free market.

You’ll be surprised how expensive everything is to build if you pay domestic wages instead of buying things dirt cheap from other countries where wages are low due to slave-like working conditions. This is probably what Trump wants to establish in the US, but when other factors like housing, food etc are already way more expensive than they are in those countries, this creates a poverty hellscape for y’all. The result will be that people can’t even afford to live at the standard of a chinese factory worker. Enjoy.