All engineering is influenced by other engineering. Most aircraft look more or less the same because that's the state of the art most efficient shape.

This company got the first methane powered rocket to orbit.

For manual labour perhaps, but for clerical work, and especially for complex work like engineering, 36h/week of high productivity would be exceptional.

Around here the police usually won't come out to surveillance alerts, unless a human has manually reviewed them first.

It's how the cops use every new bit of tech. When DNA came in, they were arresting people on very flimsy DNA evidence that later turned out to either be flawed or easily and obviously explained away.

Happened when IP addresses became their new toy. Still happens with fingerprints, which, despite what CSI may tell you, rarely present an exact match.

I do think disappearing people is wrong, obviously, although I'm not sure that's exactly what happened to Ma. Keeping in mind the damage it would have done to him to be publicly arrested or rebuked, and the fact that later the Chinese premier convinced him to move back to China, and then he attended various events including one with Xi... Well, it's not quite how it was portrayed in the Western media. Not good, but we don't really know what happened.

There has to be a balance somewhere between that and the EU's not-quite-strong-enough regulation of tech companies.

All that matters is if Trump believes it was Made in USA or not.

I really doubt that Chinese rocket scientists are simply copying without understanding.

It just goes to show you, there's none more gullible than the paranoid.

Thanks, that's interesting. Sounds good, corporate responsibility.

How is that different from Western countries? They are expected to follow the law, the larger ones have lawyers on hand, and if they don't comply they can be shut down in the worst cases.

You can argue that it's different to have a government appointed compliance officer, but even that happens when companies royally screw up in Europe. The Netherlands recently appointed someone to run NXP, and the UK has been re-nationalizing failing rail franchise businesses.

In some cases they just developed Western university research into actual products, something we should have done but failed to. Some of the battery tech comes to mind.

There was a significant amount of work to develop it into a high end product, but because they had the certainly of long term government support for EVs and battery technology, they threw money at it and engineered solutions.

Many phone manufacturers are now offering updates for longer too. Longevity is definitely becoming a selling point.

Even the best of them only offer about 8 years of support though. To be fair to Microsoft, Windows 11 came out in 2021, and supports most machines up to about 6-7 years old, so they aren't really an outlier. It's just that people expect computers to last longer, which isn't unreasonable. Microsoft used to let you install newer Windows even if it wouldn't work right, so for example I had 10 on a laptop designed for 8, and it was mostly okay but lack of drivers meant power management didn't work right and you couldn't turn the fan off completely.

That's the real change here. You could bodge it before, and now Microsoft is trying to stop you doing that.

Most of the high end stuff comes from China too. Everything from designer handbags to overpriced hifi components to EV drivetrains.

Just because someone slapped a badge on it and a "made in USA" logo doesn't mean most of the work wasn't done in China or some other country from that region. That's literally all they do with a lot of this stuff - sew a brand logo on in Italy, do a final bit of software installation in the US.

If you want crap, try buying a British made car. Nissan do okay because they are Japanese, but most JLR cars are unreliable crap. Notorious for being easy to steal and having expensive mechanical issues.

Doesn't your country have any consumer protection laws?

In the UK the law is that things must last a "reasonable length of time". If you buy expensive and supposedly durable boots and they turn out not to be durable at all, you have legal redress. Additionally, faults that develop within the first 6 months of ownership are by default assumed to be manufacturing defects, unless the manufacturer can prove otherwise.