Tip-of-my-hat for your excellent and well-reasoned analysis. Sadly, that's rare on MR.
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Apple CEO Tim Cook Touts Benefits of Globalization in China Speech
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Tip-of-my-hat for your excellent and well-reasoned analysis. Sadly, that's rare on MR.
Tim Cook isn't the only hypocrite here. Globalization, as a whole, does drive down the cost of items people in the west buy. It does this by reducing the cost of manufacturing an item by paying pennies on the dollar to workers in countries that are mostly located in Asia, and not having to follow health, safety or working condition regulations required in the US or Western Europe.
And consumers buy those items, even if they know it hurts local jobs. Without the willing help of a significant number of consumers the current form of Globalization wouldn't last. Yes you have 'Buy American' campaigns but they are more sound than fury. People will hurt their own long term interests by preferring cheap overseas produced goods over the locally produced ones, encouraging more companies to take jobs overseas.
Just as consumers go for cheap, companies go for profits. With current bought and paid for Senators and Congressmen voting in favor of trade laws that do not take cost of living, even in low wage countries, into account, let alone safety regulations or number of hours worked you will have the trade laws that have the massive imbalance we see right now. But the blame goes beyond just the companies.
And consumers buy those items, even if they know it hurts local jobs. Without the willing help of a significant number of consumers the current form of Globalization wouldn't last. Yes you have 'Buy American' campaigns but they are more sound than fury. People will hurt their own long term interests by preferring cheap overseas produced goods over the locally produced ones, encouraging more companies to take jobs overseas.
Just as consumers go for cheap, companies go for profits. With current bought and paid for Senators and Congressmen voting in favor of trade laws that do not take cost of living, even in low wage countries, into account, let alone safety regulations or number of hours worked you will have the trade laws that have the massive imbalance we see right now. But the blame goes beyond just the companies.
So, in other words, we could pretty much just stop exporting and importing oil? And then we’d just be using oil from our own country (mostly)?
Yep. We have become a nation of price-driven shoppers, even when it becomes ludicrous, like when gas gets expensive and people have meanwhile bought big ol' SUVs again, so they end up having to spend $20 in gas to drive to and from a Walmart 25 miles away because they forgot a $3 gallon of milk. See we drove out of business the little stores in the village that would sell you a quart of milk for $1.25. Later on we wanted that option again, but it was gone.
There are two, maybe three general stores left in this county now. There's a Walmart up in the next county over a wicked mountain. Everyone I know keeps boxes of nonfat dry milk packets in their pantry. This is a county once renowned for its dairy farms and general stores in its dozens of tiny villages, little stores sometimes doing business for over 100 years, places that sold everything from barn boots to birthday cards. How things change in a few decades.
Not generally being one for nostalgia, I'm a fan of a lot of the changes technology has brought us. But I am sorry that for at least a few decades we in the USA seemed to lose our taste for quality goods and our desire to support local endeavors at retail prices affording the shopkeepers at best a skinny margin. We had a lot of money in that timeframe, the 80s, 90s. We began to ignore the little stores in favor of big box bargains a little farther away. A lot farther away, wallet-wise, when gas prices rose. Trying to get those little stores back now is proving a real slog. Not only do we still have that price-driven shopping habit, many more of us have no job, or have less well paid jobs than back when we blithely drove past those mom and pop shops that we figured were charging a ripoff price for a quart of milk. Now we know it wasn't a ripoff but we couldn't afford to pay that price even if the store magically reappeared.
I've long had this theory that the way price-driven competition for retail dollar in the US goes, there will finally come a day when there's One Big Store, and it will sell Coke, and it will be someplace in Texas, and the price -- if you can afford to get there-- will be sky high. Kinda like back when the Soviet Union's supermarkets had mostly bare shelves and failing that, offered a vast selection of size 13 men's left shoes at an exorbitant price because there was no competition. Well, there's more than one way to end up with a really inefficient economy. We're getting there in the USA. Boycotts can't be the turnaround solution, because when you look around, where ya gonna shop? In my county, the answer is "not here". Not any more. We boycotted the wrong damn kind of store 20 years ago!
Well, you make it sound like globalization is something that just happens. The export of jobs in exchange for cheap goods is something that a government allows or not depending on its policy goals. Whether that is "Globalism" or not is unclear.
I think globalization helps everyone in the long run even though, as Cook says, it hurts some people in the short run. And it's easy to start blaming it. European countries have been guilty of protectionist economics for a long time, and now the U.S. might start doing it too under Trump. Makes me sad.
However, China specifically needs to be boycotted to death for horribly polluting natural resources that all nations share, plus other crimes against the world like supporting North Korea and likely DDoSing foreign businesses.
However, China specifically needs to be boycotted to death for horribly polluting natural resources that all nations share, plus other crimes against the world like supporting North Korea and likely DDoSing foreign businesses.
Correction, less expensive very high quality goods what's being delivered. Not cheap in quality. A tough competitive market.
I was with you on that post until you said boycott China for polluting shared natural resources. They're entering cleanup mode now, having scared themsleves half to death via experience of undrinkable water and soil so poisoned they can't eat produce from it.
Now it's the USA who according to Trump's anti-science ideas and according cabinet picks is on the point of denying climate change, ditching followups on the Paris Agreement (to which both China and the US were among almost 200 other signatories), discarding EPA rules that get in any industry's way of making a buck right now, and sticking that agency with an intentionally murderous budget cut. Never mind selling off federal lands to private interests for whatever purpose they like to put them, instead of keeping them as our American heritage and allowing mixed-use under supervision of federal law.
Maybe it's China should start boycotting us for having exported the polluting part of our manufacturing over there. After all the steel we get is from there. They are who put up with the dangerous ingredients and toxic byproducts of so much manufacturing involving plastics. They're who have to wear masks now to bicycle to work on a day with no wind and have to worry if rivers will catch fire thanks to petrol-based spills. Our time of having set a major river on fire accidentally is in the rear view, or at least it has been until Trump now threatens to let it come around again.
Or maybe none of us should boycott each other, and we should all keep our commitments made at the Paris Areements.. Things seem to work out better anyway when companies engage in trade with each other and work on common problems together as well. There are more opportunities to trade ideas, offer constructive criticism in the spirit of making a deal better for both sides and so forth. It beats establishing a sullen silence broken only by threats of war.
Tim will say anything to get sales out of China. Very hypocritical.
What exactly did he say that you found so outrageous?
Imagine that, a CEO representing his company trying to get sales out of China. What the heck was he thinking? I'm certain no other CEO of a company the size of Apple would dare do such a thing.
What so many people here (and elsewhere) don't seem to get is that the best way to change countries like China and Saudi Arabia is through globalization. However much it's become the bogeyman du jour, globalization is one reason why we haven't fewer people are in poverty than ever before, why fewer people are in slavery than ever before, why more children are being education than ever before, and why we've seen fewer wars than ever before (countries don't tend to go to war with trading partners).
You don't change countries and improve the plight of the poor around the world by ignoring them.
I know people hate the idea of globalization now, and it certainly has its negatives, but the alternative is isolationism, and that doesn't tend to lead to good things.
You don't change countries and improve the plight of the poor around the world by ignoring them.
I know people hate the idea of globalization now, and it certainly has its negatives, but the alternative is isolationism, and that doesn't tend to lead to good things.
From the very first opening to China-- Nixon/Mao, remember-- the same bunch of fuddleduddle has been said. No, China is not a Western democracy. It only briefly had something like that, with Sun-Yat Sen. But History happened. What's sure is that China is quite a bit better off than they were as recently as 1980. We are one globe. Our civilization, such as it is at any moment, develops by cooperation and trade.
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Hitler's overdramatic for now. Fascism is what he is. More like Mussolini. Vain, stupid popinjay.
Thank you for your reply, it's well thought out and constructed, mine was just quick and emotional due to the frustration of the current state of macs . I don't disagree with you.
Err, you're selling the benefits of free trade in the wrong direction, Tim.
I hear what you're saying but history will say that maintaining the statuts quo, no matter how grand and successful, is NOT enough to jump the innovation curve. Every DAY they just milk the iPhone they are slipping behind. Steve Jobs was a product visionary and that is THE foundation that Apples success has been built upon. Without product vision they are just a commodity in a very competitive market. I don't believe Apple currently has the leadership necessary to continue their historical success. If they don't get it together in a few short years people will be in shock wondering how the hell Apple lost it. Well, they lost it in the past after they fired Jobs. They came roaring back after he returned. Without a product visionary willing to take risks, they are just shuffling deck chairs on the titanic. Cook hasn't a freaking clue when it comes to products and Ive can't grasp the big picture. Sure they both can obsess on the "perfect chamfered radius" of the corners of an iPhone or MacBook. That's execution....not vision and not leadership. They haven't a clue at the moment. They are bluffing and blowing smoke up peoples behind. Otherwise, Cook wouldn't be jet setting around the globe like some prima donna globalist oligarch. I might be wrong but I call them like I see them. Cook is doing what he knows to do and he's NOT a product guy. Apple is basically NUC at the moment. Drifting into irrelevance. It's very painful and upsetting to see whats going on.
Actually what concerns me is the attitudes of people who absolutely will not listen to or respect, and in some cases physically attack anyone with dissenting views. And I'm seeing that happen more on the left in the past 4 months. The facism label is ironically on the accusers.
We sure the hell could. BUT - the greenies wont let us get at our own oil. Sucks. It'd be $.79 cents a gallon forever if we could just dig, baby!
Tim had nothing to say about not allowing the Chinese government access to locked iPhones in that country. The Chinese government is obviously very authoritarian and if Apples plays hardball with that government the way they did with the US government China will kick Apple out of the country so fast your head will spin. Apple will roll over for the Chinese Government like a fat seal.
So, in other words, we could pretty much just stop exporting and importing oil? And then we’d just be using oil from our own country (mostly)?
You can’t blame us for China's pollution. It’s their own fault that they don’t have something like the EPA. Sure, if we kept making our own stuff instead of having the Chinese make it, China wouldn’t be polluted - or at least, less polluted. But the problem is their manufacturing practices.
And about “Trump’s anti-science ideas” - it’s a a little ironic because, despite running on the Republican ticket, he’s actually more of a centrist. He registered as a Democrat back in the 80’s.
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Isolationism worked fantastically for decades. Then you globalists came in and shipped many of the jobs to other countries.
I know, you’re probably thinking globalization will lead to a single-government utopia like in Star Trek, but it’s just not going to work. We’ve been trying it since the 80’s, and it hasn’t work out so well for us.
One way to "change" some countries is through globalization, but that only works if their elites buy into the whole we want to "change" idea.
Europe had lots of motivation to change. Other areas, not so much. How much better off is, say, Latin America? Sub-Saharan Africa?
"Globalization" by itself does nothing; it's just a word, or at best a set of policies.
Europe had lots of motivation to change. Other areas, not so much. How much better off is, say, Latin America? Sub-Saharan Africa?
"Globalization" by itself does nothing; it's just a word, or at best a set of policies.
Just be a good CEO, Tim. I am getting really tired of every company feeling the need to get political, make political statements, support this, disavow that... Just make good products and services, please.
Globalization and isolationism are not opposite things. Both are bad when taken to extremes. Extreme isolationism gives you things like North Korea. Extreme globalism kills local cultures. You can be "open" and trade fairly without being stupid. Unfortunately it appears that responsible, fair trade relations have been elusive for about the past 24 years, at least.