Comments by "D W" (@DW-op7ly) on "China's powerful new sonar can fit in a shoebox, penetrate foreign submarine hulls, injure crew" video.
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Most people believed this about 20 years ago when the Chinese were seen as copycats
But then they don’t even know their own history
👇
A nation of outlaws
A century ago, that wasn't China -- it was us
One hundred and fifty years ago, even America's closest trade partners were despairing about our cheating ways. Charles Dickens, who visited in 1842, was, like many Britons, stunned by the economic ambition of our nation's inhabitants, and appalled by what they would do for the sake of profit. When he first stepped off the boat in Boston, he found the city's bookstores rife with pirated copies of his novels, along with those of his countrymen. Dickens would later deliver
lectures decrying the practice, and wrote home in outrage: "my blood so boiled as I thought of the monstrous injustice." In theUnited States of the early 19th century, capitalism as we know it today was still very much in its infancy. Most people still lived on small farms, and despite the persistent myth that America was the land of laissez-faire, there were plenty of laws on the books aimed at keeping tight reins on the market economy. But as commerce became more complex, and stretched over greater distances, this patchwork system of local and state-level regulations was gradually overwhelmed by a new generation of wheeler-dealer entrepreneurs.
Taking a page from the British, who had pioneered many ingenious methods of adulteration a generation or two earlier, American manufacturers, distributors, and vendors of food began tampering with their products en masse -- bulking out supplies with cheap filler, using dangerous additives to mask spoilage or to give foodstuffs a more appealing color.
Boston Globe
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