Comments by "XSportSeeker" (@XSpImmaLion) on "How Amazon's Super-Complex Shipping System Works" video.

  1. Logistics is a huge part of everything, that is often overlooked, and it's also one of the reasons why insanely huge global mass production of several lines of products is never going to "come back" from countries like China, to the US or whatever. It's not - like some that have a decades late mentality - only about cheap labor, lax regulations and that surface level stuff. And the technology, R&D and investment in it is also something that lots of people don't get. Because it's not part of the news circle, and not interesting for most people... except Wendover and fans. xD It's not only the infrastructure that determine these things... it's a huge flurry of technological development, mountains worth of tiny to huge improvements made over the years in every single process that involves all of this, which most developed countries fell behind because they offshored the entire thing decades ago. The factories build by foreign companies in countries like China decades ago are not the same anymore, they have evolved, and they have changed, by the hands of chinese companies and chinese workers. In the west, we're still talking stuff like just in time, fordism, blah blah blah... we don't have the tech, the practice, the experience, the knowledge, the manpower, the anything anywhere close to attending market demands such as producing millions of units of commoditized complex electronic products before the holiday season or something like that. Yes, western media likes to focus on stuff like slave labor, exploitation, child labor, horrible factory floor conditions, pollution crisis, plus a bunch of stuff from time to time, with good reasons to do it, but we don't see much talked about the miracle that had to happen for industries in China to mass produce products to the point it does. Modern afluent western societies only reaped the benefits of stuff like fast fashion and an insane ammount of cheap electronics being churned out as peanuts out of factories. Even stuff on the very tail end of it, like mining... it's not that you can't find minerals in other places of the planet, it's that most countries cannot outcompete China because it has been developing new tech in the area for decades, shaving every tiny portion of fat from the extraction process. And for people who are thinking, well, there are lots of other poor countries, mostly poor Asian countries, replacing China on that role... yes, that's true. But guess what? It's chinese factories going global, not those countries doing it by themselves. When you read news and hear stories about iPhones not being made in China anymore, laptops moving production to some country like Vietnam or Indonesia, some commodity that is now being produced in some African country or Latin American country... this is happening, as a result of China moving more towards a middle class society. But if you read the fine print, it's not exactly that poor countries are assuming the role... it's chinese factories expanding globally. And for stuff like smartphones, laptops, game consoles, portables and whatnot... it's mostly Foxconn, and a few other chinese electronic component producers that opened factories all over the world, or assembly facturies that basically import everything from China, put it together using local labor, and then often ship it back to China, where the massive chinese logistics is used to redistribute everything worldwide. And so, this is why the Foxconn plant in the US failed... it was an expensive symbolic gesture made to appease Trump, which his adminstration probably knew full well or were just composed of enough incompetent people that couldn't do the math. It just doesn't make sense for a company like Foxconn to open up factories in the US - the labor is too expensive, the regulations are too high, and it doesn't make sense from an economic standpoint. This is also why some factories are closing doors here in Brazil. Our currency is too unstable, our dumb bureaucracy is too slow and taxing, it has become too expensive to do business here. But this is the price we're paying for overreliance on mega corporations dominating entire markets and being free to pick and chose the poorest countries that are more willing to offer cheap unregulated labor, cut taxes, pay more incentives, and comply with whatever demands corporations have to increase their profit margins. The Amazon case if pretty symbolic inside the US, but it's just another piece of the puzzle of late stage capitalism.
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  2. Meowalmart
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