Welcome to Slashdot. Anything that suggests China may not be the biggest bad doesn't tend to fare very well.

IKEA stuff is usually decent quality, and being a big popular brand is usually well supported too. Using Matter means no internet connection needed, should work with Home Assistant.

Hopefully this shakes up the market a bit and drives down costs. Their air purifiers are good too, and are disrupting the market with their much lower prices.

Per capita is the only measure that matters, unless you are willing to suggest culling billions of people as a solution.

Even in the US it's a bit more complicated than that. Most jurisdictions only allow trademarks on common words in very narrow markets, so e.g. Microsoft's claim on "visual" only applies to development software products, and not other types of software, or anything that isn't software.

Lower wages were only a small part of it. The next logical step in mass production was to combine products from different brands. Why make socks for just one brand, when you can make socks for a hundred brands, mostly identical except for the logos and dye colours? And why ship the cotton from where it is grown to the US, and the re-export it to Europe for sales, when you can just have a factory next to the fields and then ship directly from there to retail?

Now we are into the next phase, which is the factories selling direct to consumers.

It's not just that, it's that too many industries don't want to modernize, and too many people don't want anything near them to change (NIMBYs).

Take the cheap energy issue. There is loads of cheap energy. We have a massive fusion reactor that is fuelled for billions of years, providing more power than we could ever use, and the technology to harvest it. Some countries are taking advantage of that, but many European and US ones are stuck with high energy costs because they refuse to. That's a choice, not an unfortunate reality we can do nothing about.

That wouldn't help with Cloudflare and similar CDNs. DNS just doesn't propagate fast enough to work with dynamic caching.

It's better we don't try to come up with a technical fix for what is a legal problem anyway. The issue is site blocking on copyright grounds, initiated by private corporations.

Also, it's not like the US manufacturers aren't heavily supported by the government either. Bailouts when things go wrong, favourable laws, tariffs and import bans, and of course the coal roller in chief helping to stifle competition and keep their legacy fossil vehicles popular.

If the US gives up on EVs, it will be the outlier in a world that is fast adopting them. There will be economic consequences as manufacturers fall even further behind on the technology, and US emissions from fossil fuel vehicles remain higher than rivals. The cost of transporting things is falling below the cost of fossil fuels that were previously needed. It's not great for the health of Americans either.

The fact that Ford can't seem to succeed here is yet another sign that Ford is a failure and only surviving with heavy government assistance.

China's emissions peaked at less than half those of Americans though. Somehow they are doing even more manufacturing, but without emitting so much greenhouse gas.

While I agree with you, it's something not to be said out loud. De-humanising a group is literally the first thing the Nazis actually did, so it's kind of funny to see you call them Nazis while applying some of their playbook.

Unfortunately modern politics has devolved into name calling. People don't like being called names, and as such they don't like the people who call them names and call them names back. Rinse repeat from the other side. It results in people who may not be too different getting more extreme from opposite sides of the camp.

How are EV's a bubble? They make up a tiny portion of the market and are following a standard technological growth trend. The only bubble in the EV world is Tesla's over inflated share-price.

How is that a problem? ${Country} has been subsidizing ${Local_Industry} since governments were first formed. I find it disingenious for Americans to complain about China subsidizing EV production. Specifically Americans. The American whose taxes bailed out Ford and GM. The only reason they survived is government support.

The bigger problem is Western governments have been insanely fucking shortsighted and *not* subsidised EV production enough, leaving it open to someone with more resources to start cornering the market. By the way the EU analysed the level of subsidy provided by the Chinese government and applied tariffs appropriately. The effect isn't as big as you make it out.

And go look at the ones which aren't fake-sold. It seems like your view of the industry is based on shock news stories from the Daily Mail. If we all followed that it stands to reason that no one ever bought a Cybertruck, after all they were being abandoned in shopping mall lots as well. The reality is the stories about fake-sale EVs were not different than any story about cars when certain government deadlines hit. They were little more than a curious blip intended to meet short term numbers. Yes there's Chinese EVs which were fake-sold, and they are a tiny minority of the total production.

You say dump as if it's trash as opposed to what they actually are: very nice competently manufactured cars with great bang for buck. There's a reason why Ford's CEO drives a Chinese made EV, and then proceeded to publicly praise it. And it's not because his bonus is tied to tanking his share price.

Disclosure: I drive a Chinese made EV. A friend owns a Geely directly. Both are cars that I would buy again in a heartbeat. They are cars I chose over Audi, VW, Toyota, Tesla and Renault, all which were I test drove at the time. And while it wasn't a testdrive I dare say I'm absolutely shocked at the one time I had the true horrendous displeasure of driving a Mustang Mach-e, talk about "dump".

Exactly. You're 100% right on the definition and seem to have a lack of understanding about Steam itself. There are *NO* substitutes in the PC gaming. Substitute doesn't mean "build your own" or just "do something else", it means "achieve the outcome" in the economic sense.

There are other PC gaming stores, stores like Epic. And developers who have made Epic an exclusive have to date universally lost money and sales on their games until the point where they released on Steam at which point their sales recovered. By definition a substitute that is not viable for your business is not a substitute.

For developers Steam literally ticks every box you mentioned. They are a single seller (the alternatives lack customers, lack platform market share, and lack the APIs and options provided), there are no substitutes, price is inelastic (Steam set the entire industry price, they are often cited in the Google / Apple antitrust suits), and there's a high barrier to entry (Epic has so far spent $4bn without providing a viable substitute, EA, has abandoned its attempt at an App store).

It actually is, because market power is the one thing that underpins literally every characteristic you mentioned. Without market power you don't get the characteristics. Without those characteristics you don't have market power.