Kids, buying OEM parts from the manufacturer is never ever cheap. Where do you buy new tires from? Please don't say the dealer, ffs. Nobody over produces and sits on a dragon's hoard of spare parts to keep the prices down. You never buy OEM to save money, you do it for peace of mind, situationally.

Shit, I'm looking up OEM parts for my Dell laptop and all they have are batteries and SSDs, no screens, touchpads, keyboard assemblies, etc. What's there is overpriced, ofc. I'm sure they have other parts somewhere if I send it in for repairs, or their certified partners probably can get them, probably resell them sometimes. Guess what a gray market OEM display assembly for this Dell Precision goes for. I can tell you it makes more sense to buy a new laptop if it was my money.

You can ding a company for their support options and how well they take care of you under a support contract, I don't think you should ever judge a company by OEM parts supplies.. that's just stupid.

It's not a bad point either. You shouldn't be celebrating the ability to buy stuff in a way that provides no accountability, no legal recourse, and no requirement for local laws to be followed.

The paperwork isn't an issue if you buy 1000 of something. Let an importer deal with something, and then hold them accountable for when that Chinesium breaks and burns your house down.

Maybe you'll think twice about that $10 power brick that doesn't meet UL specifications for spark gap distance from Aliexpress. Or maybe you won't buy that $10 shoe insole from Shein with 10x the permissible level of lead for consumer goods. Or don't buy your kids toys from Temu with phthalates levels 240x times the legal limit. Or children's toys which are obviously choking hazards and would be subject to a forced recall if distributed by a distributor locally.

You should want a middle man to handle the import who you can hold accountable because you as a consumer (the royal you, i.e. the general population) will outright fuck yourself over in order to save even a dollar.

Were the examples oddly specific sounding? That's because they were real. Also a consumer group in Denmark found recently 100% of products they bought from China were unsafe and failed to meet EU regulations. Is that what you want? All for saving a few dollars? Surely there's more effective ways of harming yourself.

Problem (Perceived) : Music piracy is rampant
Solution (failed): be completely cunty and sue random poors into oblivion to prove a point.
Solution (actual): iTunes/Spotify, i.e easy/cheap access to what people actually wanted to listen to

I'd wager casual piracy by consumers (i.e. downloading some random shitty movie) was significantly less common when netflix was virtually the only game in town. Then like absolute cunts the rights holders decided to be greedy and carve out their own crappy streaming services. Now it's once again stupidly expensive to have access to everything you'd care to watch, and piracy is the answer.
It's like (((rights holders))) cannot fathom the idea that their perceived value of $media is far, far higher than that of consumer's valuation. They'll pay a buck to watch some hollywood slop perhaps, but a monthly bill north of $60 to subscribe to a bunch of shitty, cunty streaming services that shove unskippable advertisements down your throat is a totally different situation.

American "\justice" favors the rich.

The goal of the Trump and Russian misinformation game is to make you just not believe in anything. To make your mind melt. Go back to the Original Documents of the United States of America. The Constitution of the United States. WE the People... Read Benjamin Franklin writings. The greatness that we can be. Don't buy into the trump mish mash bullshit of lies.