It's not. Third world countries have much bigger concerns than policing the first world's imaginary property. Mostly they'll just ignore any violations for as long as economically viable. If it's important enough, HIV medications for example, they'll even make the fact they don't care about patents official.
> I doubt that IP of tractor designs is a major factor in third world poverty.
what's your logic here? the intellectual property system is the way the global north propertied class dominates the global south; i.e. renting out the commoditized blueprints/designs and charging insane royalties [1]
E.g. precisely what patent, design patent, trademark, or copyright is stopping the entire of Africa from designing and building an indigenous diesel tractor?
the west is literally trying to provoke a huge war with china because china is no longer dependent on the west's intellectual property. your framing seems ignorant to me.
The global west is realizing it done goofed up; because China does not give a shit about IP and now has the intellectual capability to successfully produce new products which compete with US product. The good news is that China's economy is actually a bigger mess than ours somehow, despite our limited means of production. Everyone is too scared of nuclear war, but the actual war is a strange economic war of 'Who is going to collapse first'.
Isn't this the same situation that the USA eventually found itself in with respect to the USSR? I think the whole cold war can be re-envisioned as a socioeconomic conflict.
I believe it so as well. I was just reinforcing that I don't believe conventional war can occur without a major technological innovation in missile defense. It all comes down to sociology-economics, which is in turn downstream of culture. Neither the USA or China have close to optimal culture, but even accounting for western propaganda, the United States is a much happier place.
Source: I met many Chinese people in college. Many of them were striving for success with such fervor because they wanted to stay in America.
Not attacking, I am genuinely curious about what you think. From the outside looking in, it seems like people are overworked, overcrowded and rather unequal. Also they have a lot of pollution in many areas.
I would still rather live in the US, as an American, but I don't think this is how to think about the original statement. It's all relative, right? In absolute terms you can say they're overworked and overcrowded, but they can still be happier than us because they reference their past experience and they see the progress the country has made. We see a lot of dissatisfaction in the US today, despite having higher QoL than China, because things have not improved for large swathes of the population. I'd honestly be surprised if the average Chinese citizen were less happy than the average American.
I also appreciate the Chinese faith in their government and their sense of national purpose. People talk ad nauseam about our political polarity, but another issue is that it's basically American culture to question government competence now. I don't think people fully realize how damaging that is for society. Pollution and inequality are problems, but the sense of most Chinese is that the government is working to fix them. What do you think they see if they look at us? Probably theatrics and gridlock, that's what Americans feel after all
Corruption in its forms – bribes, nepotism, scams perpetrated by officials, selective law enforcement, exploitation of socialised resources and capital for personal gain by officials, arbitrate rule changes without prior notice – are experienced by the populace on a daily basis from their local-level government. It creates magnitudes stronger problems than theatrics and gridlock. There is no one who is content with the work and quality of the local-level government. The people can only bitch in private because they know that public petitions are ignored and protests/demonstrations/riots are swiftly cracked down.
The effects of the high-level government OTOH usually cannot be seen or felt directly. A constructed image of the effects is disseminated by the propaganda arm of the party through newspapers, tv and radio, internet. People do like these success stories, but they are not accurate w.r.t. reality.
This perspective is not useful. You have to put yourself into the shoes of an abroad student, and then you will understand why the majority of them chooses to return home after getting the degree. Attraction factors are generally more important than the detraction factors you enumerated (overcrowding isn't even an objective one): these people want to be with their network of family and acquaintances, be part of a culture and speak the language they understand, and exploit their new knowledge to become wealthy without additional hurdles.
There is a school of economics that claims to oppose the upwardly mobile rich but in fact mostly harms the upwardly mobile poor. Linguistic patterns are no proof of motive but they certainly indicate who an author is writing for.
“We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.”
I feel like tractors are like AK-47s, kinda de facto grandfathered in before Neo-liberalism and Globalization made exporting IP law a big part part of of geopolitics.
Basic tractors, like the AK-47, are also designable by most decent mechanical engineering students without a lot of work if they spent an afternoon googling first for prior art (and that prior art has long had any patents expire).
Which if there is an ecosystem related to this, that’s great as the manufacturing is where you need economies of scale pretty badly and everyone benefits from it.
There is no also no need for a basic excavator to cost $30k or more. Let’s do something about that too!
Look, I really want open source to meet the "real world", and not be stuck as another "socialism for the rich" where companies can do things on the cheap but the software is useless to the average person as an alternative to anything. (Great example: Google using Linux in Android does not mean the user is any more free of advertizing and spying!)
But unless I misunderstand what this is for, I think the economies of scale needed are in way fancier things like combine harvesters. When farmers decry the rent-seeking of John Deere, I don't think they are talking about basic tractor-bulldozers? Conversely, as the other replies say, there is little issue with decades-old-style tractors, right?
What I really want to see is an open source Khrushchyovka. The worlds needs more cities, not villages.
I think you’re right, and doing some more digging this seems if anything a somewhat useless engineer-wouldn’t-it-be-cool type project that isn’t solving any of the real problems that people face. Sigh.
On the more positive side, maybe some things in here are necessary first steps, and best get to more useful things later building upon them. I am not sure, I didn't dig to deep yet.
Not just Asia. Mahindra, an Indian concern (with PRC operating units), builds some tractors and trucks in Africa (I know of plants in at least Mali and South Africa) for various African markets.
