How much do you think it costs to make a pair of Nike shoes in Asia?

Americans need to get over their view of “Asia” as being about making shoes. When I was working in engineering in the early aughts, we mocked the Chinese as being able only to copy American technology. Today, China is competitive with or ahead of America in key technology areas, including nuclear power, AI, EVs, and batteries.

We need to anticipate a future where China is equal to America on a per capita basis, but four times bigger. Is that a world where “Designed by Apple in California, Made in China” still makes sense? What will be America’s competitive edge in that scenario?

What seems most likely to me in the future is that the US will find itself in the same position the UK is in now. Dominating finance and services won’t mean anything when both the IP and the physical products are being produced somewhere else.

> US will find itself in the same position the UK is in now

The thing is .. there's a point here, but it's not at all tied in with physical products. People are obsessed with one side of the ledger while refusing to see the other. Most of the stuff the UK is struggling with (transport, healthcare, energy) are "state capacity" issues. Things where the state is unavoidably involved and having better, more decisive leadership and not getting bogged down in consultations, would make a big difference.

The UK stepped on its own rake because it was obsessed with tiny, already vanished industries like fishing. Fishing is less profitable for the whole UK than Warhammer. It's not actually where we want to be. While real UK manufacture successes (cars, aircraft, satellites, generators, all sorts of high-tech stuff) get completely ignored. Or bogged down in extra export red tape thanks to Brexit.

To improve reality, we have to start from reality, not whatever vision of the past propaganda "news" channels are blathering about.

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Freedom of Expression is part of the Human Rights Act 1998.

It's not the Labour party that's campaigning to repeal this act.

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Except since no parliament can bind a future parliament it won't be worth the paper it's written on.

The loudest voices calling for a scrap are exactly the people you DON'T want deciding what human rights you'll be "allowed".

And incitement to violence is, and always should be, unprotected speech - your silly "two tier kier" is informing me greatly that you're on the "they locked them up for hurty words!" bandwagon.

Weird, the bill of rights act of 1689 is still in force.

It’s literally the policy of this country to sentence white men to harsher custodial sentences with more chance of a custodial sentence than any other group, simply for the crime of being a white man. Are these the sorts of people you think should decide our rights?

If the government would do what people have been voting for for decades and end mass immigration and take real action on this ridiculous and purposeful misuse of the human rights act, then nobody would want to redact it.

But they won’t.

It is not the "policy of this country" you need to actually read how things work, what bodies have what power, and who is doing what.

The sentencing council is an independant body, they are not the government, and the government has said "no, that's not right" so they're passing a bill to stop the new guidelines coming into effect: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/government-to-introduce-l...

It's the policy of this country, it doesn't matter who sets it.

It doesn't matter if it's set by parliament. It doens't matter if it's set by an independent body. The fact is that you will receive a harsher sentence for being a white male than you will if you belong to any other group. That is the policy. The Conservative government thought that was the right thing to do.

Apparently the new government 'will' introduce a bill to stop this, but they haven't yet. So it's still the policy.

Meanwhile it's legal and popular to discriminate against white men and women on the basis of being white - the government, police and military regularly put out jobs only for none whites. But if I were to put out a role only for whites, that's against the law. This discrimination extends to our top universities where it's becoming much more difficult (relative to population %) to obtain a spot as a white student.

That's why people think this country is now a two tier system, and they're right. Opportunities are being taken from those who have earned them and given to those who have not. Meritocracy and equality under the law is already long gone.