<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>tw04</author><text>&amp;gt;When Westerners see an absurdly profitable company, they think, &amp;quot;why aren&amp;#x27;t they paying their employees more??!&amp;quot; and start a union to parasitize earnings.&lt;p&gt;Saying that employees expecting a livable wage is &amp;quot;parasitizing earnings&amp;quot; is a pretty outrageous claim.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;It&amp;#x27;s an important difference for manufacturing physical things and it&amp;#x27;s why the West loses out to Asia in manufacturing outside cutting-edge tech.&lt;p&gt;The West lost out to Asia because their standard of living was so much lower that it was basically slave labor for a decade.  You apparently have missed out on the repeated protests at factories across China with their workers demanding better working conditions and wages.&lt;p&gt;Expecting to be able to be able to do something more than just not starve to death isn&amp;#x27;t a western ideal, it&amp;#x27;s a human ideal.  When the company you work for is printing money and you&amp;#x27;re living in poverty, something eventually gives.  As has happened at literally every point in human history to date.  Sometimes through violence, sometimes through government intervention.  But the &amp;quot;unwashed masses&amp;quot; won&amp;#x27;t stay ignorant forever.</text><parent_chain><item><author>CountSessine</author><text>Yes - because manufacturing in the West is ultimately self-defeating. Success breeds complacency and labor unrest. This isn&amp;#x27;t just a China-thing (I have no idea what your Potemkin regulation is or why you would mix those metaphors).&lt;p&gt;When Westerners see an absurdly profitable company, they think, &amp;quot;why aren&amp;#x27;t they paying their employees more??!&amp;quot; and start a union to parasitize earnings.&lt;p&gt;When Asians (including the Japanese and Koreans) see an absurdly profitably company, they think, &amp;quot;why are they able to charge such high prices???!&amp;quot; and they kneecap the company&amp;#x27;s ability to exploit their market.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s an important difference for manufacturing physical things and it&amp;#x27;s why the West loses out to Asia in manufacturing outside cutting-edge tech. It&amp;#x27;s defective wetware in our heads and how we think about wealth and creating value, so don&amp;#x27;t expect manufacturing supply chains to return to Western countries any time soon.</text></item><item><author>topspin</author><text>&amp;gt; The western world needs to desperately work on making their supply chains independent of the CCP&lt;p&gt;The western world can&amp;#x27;t.  The world is only so big and the remaining sites of refuge for cheap, exploitable labor and Potemkin regulatory regimes are few.  Almost any alternative place you might cite is either already beholden to China (the viable parts of Africa) or too unstable (due to endemic corruption, external threats, etc.) to risk.&lt;p&gt;Insourcing is obviously out of the question; the wealthy Western establishment is violently intolerant of industrial expansion.</text></item><item><author>tediousdemise</author><text>As much as I like Apple products, it looks like the privacy buck stops at China.&lt;p&gt;The western world needs to desperately work on making their supply chains independent of the CCP, lest they&amp;#x27;d like their supply chains to be poisoned at some point in the future.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m a big fan of Purism and everything that they are doing. I hope their software and hardware matures with the same level of polish we&amp;#x27;ve come to know and expect from Apple products, and will be an early investor if they ever decide to IPO.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>TikTok wants to keep tracking iPhone users with state-backed workaround</title><url>https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/03/chinas-tech-giants-test-way-around-apples-new-privacy-rules/</url></story>
<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>freeflight</author><text>&lt;i&gt;&amp;gt; Yes - because manufacturing in the West is ultimately self-defeating.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s much more to do with the steadily increasing complexity of products due to humanity having become very much a global species with heavy interdependence.&lt;p&gt;Look around the room you are sitting in: There will be items in it manufactured all over the world, from components also coming from all over the world.&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s not only how we manage to make these things so affordable, that&amp;#x27;s how we got them at this scale and complexity in the very first place.&lt;p&gt;The idea that a single country could emulate that, in complete isolation, is bluntly said childish. Isolationism like that doesn&amp;#x27;t lead to progress or innovation, it leads to North Korea style impoverished hermit kingdoms.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s mind-boggling how few people seem to understand this reality in the year 2021, we are so interconnected that we can instantly communicate with somebody on the other side of the planet by just pulling a small device out of our pocket, it&amp;#x27;s considered the most normal thing in the world.&lt;p&gt;Instead we get shortsighted and small-minded nationalist blowback in the form of Brexit and &amp;quot;America first!&amp;quot; politics.&lt;p&gt;Even with the EU showing that economic cooperation and integration is one of the best and most constructive ways to ensure peace, stability and prosperity, particularly vs the alternative of alienation and vilification of whole nation states and their people as &amp;quot;enemies&amp;quot; that need to be fought in every way possible.</text><parent_chain><item><author>CountSessine</author><text>Yes - because manufacturing in the West is ultimately self-defeating. Success breeds complacency and labor unrest. This isn&amp;#x27;t just a China-thing (I have no idea what your Potemkin regulation is or why you would mix those metaphors).&lt;p&gt;When Westerners see an absurdly profitable company, they think, &amp;quot;why aren&amp;#x27;t they paying their employees more??!&amp;quot; and start a union to parasitize earnings.&lt;p&gt;When Asians (including the Japanese and Koreans) see an absurdly profitably company, they think, &amp;quot;why are they able to charge such high prices???!&amp;quot; and they kneecap the company&amp;#x27;s ability to exploit their market.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s an important difference for manufacturing physical things and it&amp;#x27;s why the West loses out to Asia in manufacturing outside cutting-edge tech. It&amp;#x27;s defective wetware in our heads and how we think about wealth and creating value, so don&amp;#x27;t expect manufacturing supply chains to return to Western countries any time soon.</text></item><item><author>topspin</author><text>&amp;gt; The western world needs to desperately work on making their supply chains independent of the CCP&lt;p&gt;The western world can&amp;#x27;t.  The world is only so big and the remaining sites of refuge for cheap, exploitable labor and Potemkin regulatory regimes are few.  Almost any alternative place you might cite is either already beholden to China (the viable parts of Africa) or too unstable (due to endemic corruption, external threats, etc.) to risk.&lt;p&gt;Insourcing is obviously out of the question; the wealthy Western establishment is violently intolerant of industrial expansion.</text></item><item><author>tediousdemise</author><text>As much as I like Apple products, it looks like the privacy buck stops at China.&lt;p&gt;The western world needs to desperately work on making their supply chains independent of the CCP, lest they&amp;#x27;d like their supply chains to be poisoned at some point in the future.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m a big fan of Purism and everything that they are doing. I hope their software and hardware matures with the same level of polish we&amp;#x27;ve come to know and expect from Apple products, and will be an early investor if they ever decide to IPO.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>TikTok wants to keep tracking iPhone users with state-backed workaround</title><url>https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/03/chinas-tech-giants-test-way-around-apples-new-privacy-rules/</url></story>