Some things become so commonplace that they are just accepted, but quite why they are just accepted, nobody really knows, or talks about, or thinks about.
Let’s take Amazon, and online tat store where you can buy anything.
Except, you can’t.
This was prompted by someone telling me this morning that for the first time they decided to use a main street supermarket online shopping thing, since their car is off the road for a week waiting for a short piece of wiring and proprietary terminations for the multifunction indicator / lights / wipers etc stalk on the steering column.
Apparently they could order all sorts of stuff, including nurofen and booze, but they couldn’t order a kitchen knife, even though the local superstore that would be fulfilling the order has a whole aisle full of knives and pots and pans, you basically can’t buy anything sharp online… but you can buy drugs and booze.
Amazon will sell me a sharp knife, and booze, but not nurofen.
It reminded me of something someone said to me a while ago, you basically cannot buy viagra / cialis etc from a reputable online retailer, and why not, because it is no more lethal than aspirin / paracetamol / codeine etc which are available over the counter, you can readily overdose on paracetamol and booze bought legally over the counter, you’ll wish you died if you do, and you will you died quicker, but you can do it and despite it being regularly abused, you can still do it at will.
So why can’t you go online and buy erection pills?
The only convincing argument I have ever heard for this sort of thing is “well, it costs 0.07 pence per kilo to make, so until the patent expires we’re sticking to the channels that allow maximum revenue, and avoiding the supermarket shelf by the checkout like the plague”
I say the only convincing one, because all the other arguments have glaring holes in them that you could drive a bus through, and corporate greed doesn’t… simples.
And suddenly, places like Amazon and Tesco are no longer amazing futuristic fantasy lands where anything is possible, suddenly they are a cross between coca-cola land theme park (nuka world) and the company store in a mining town.
This isn’t to say that there aren’t any deals worth doing, there are, last week or so I bought the ballscrew linear motion rail I talked about in a previous post, it was a deal worth doing, but like any good company store amazon still got their pound of flesh, from me and from the vendor.
The vendor was chinese, the item was shipped from a bonded warehouse in France, at first I thought this was an amazon fulfilled by amazon sort of thing, but no, I dig a little deeper (easy enough when you have an invoice from someone in china and someone who can speak cantonese) it turns out that several chinese entrepreneurs have taken over huge warehouses in france and made them bonded (bonded means technically that shit hasn’t been imported and isn’t liable for duty/taxes until it leaves the warehouse) and then opened shop to chinese businesses, why hold stock in Shanghai 3 weeks away from europe when you can hold it 3 days away from the point of sale…
which is why the first stop on my imported from china by DHL package was Le Havre in France, not Shanghai.
As someone who has known a few people who have jumped through hoops and bought their own EAN barcodes to list their own shit for sale on amazon, never to sell a single item, because basically it got buried and you would find their item on page 347 of results, this is of course a direct response to, and a direct affront to, “fulfilled by amazon” because generally speaking bonded warehouses are not small operations.
But what these chinese guys are doing isn’t just bonded warehousing, it is bonded warehousing, stock control and distribution… “fulfilled by chinky”
Amazon is just the storefront and payment gateway.
If the penny hasn’t dropped yet, it fucking should have, because we are now one step away from starting up alibaba.co.uk and alibaba.fr and alibaba.de.
And alibaba ain’t fucking amazon, it’s much, much, much better.
Go on, go to the home page, and right there is a RFQ or request for quotations link.
Type in sidenafil and you get many many choices, from 1 kilo baggies up to 500 kilos a time, in bulk powder form.
Powder no good to you, then buy a fucking pill press, hundreds to choose from from a couple of grand on up.
Want to buy an electric car, there are fucking pages full of them…. if that doesn’t suit you then you can buy all the components separately.
And at a stroke the biggest impediment to doing business with china or doing business on alibaba vanishes, because the legal transaction and your legal currency never leave your own legal country… it’s not like it was 10-12 years ago when I was importing aftermarket laptop batteries direct, nobody doubted you could wire money abroad, but could you get product back that was any good… and what do you do if things go wrong….
So what does this mean for us in the west?
Well, as we already discussed, we in the west know all about corporate greed, and we have a system that supports it, so you’d *think* hundreds of millions of new potential customers in china would attract the western corporate greed types like sharks to blood in the water…
… and it did…
… and pretty much without exception our sharks found themselves being eaten alive by their sharks, and our sharks ran away screaming about copyrights and IP and other shit.
Say what you want, we *love* to talk about competition and capitalism here in the west, but, we don’t really mean it…. if you want to know what these words really mean, go to china or hang out on alibaba for a few hours.
Really, take a look at that eev blog link above, a 7 buck item.
To all those who say all chinese shit is crap, I see you, and I raise you Linux.
Take linux away from being virtual code and make it physical goods, and let everyone compete openly and you have china today, yes, there *is* a lot of complete fucking dreck out there, but the evolutionary trend is upwards.
What many fail to see is that 99% of the stuff we already buy came from places like china anyway, but the middlemen and corporate greed means the stuff we see on our shelves is several generations out of date all the time.
By the time all this comes to pass and you can buy *locally* from alibaba and chinese bonded warehouses *routinely* you’ll start to see a real revolution and real evolution in technological change.
Amazon will be toast.
Or, the chinese could just buy amazon, and fleabay, and dhl, and a bunch of other shit, from their stock of yank t bills, and call it chump change.
That 7 buck DELIVERED component tester should make you shit your boots, if it doesn’t, you do not get it.
You don’t get that there are thousands of competing items to it, and they are all evolving all the time, so fast that the January 2017 version is old hat in September 2017, meanwhile fluke are working on another version of their 5000 dollar network tester, the sort of tool that in my years of experience you only came across on a government site and even there there was only one guy who knew how to use it properly, the rule being for field engineers that no bit of kit aside from the company laptop should cost more than 50 quid, and suddenly alibaba is full of choices of CAT5/6 structured cabling testers at that price point, and however much you want to diss its specs and features and accuracy compared to the 5000 buck fluke, next years model will be better, and probably 5 buck cheaper than this years 60 buck model.
I know someone using chinese odb2 car scanners and diagnosis, he buys a new one every 12 months, and every new one has even more features and utility, and in his own words, a complete new set of kit every year is cheaper than the software licences for a year for the old western shit that he was using, and the old western shit locked him out of all kinds of things… he can actually buy odometers from scrapped motorcycles and reset them to the correct mileage for your bike, no more having to go to the factory and pay a 300 buck premium when your fancy new instrument cluster dies…. he waves the chinese thing at me with a manic look on his face, points at the odometer and says just one of these jobs a fucking month makes this thing worthwhile… I can’t even dream of doing this with the factory official shit, I’m locked out of everything… and I’m reminded of the john deere software shit going down.
At present in late 2017 there is only one barrier remaining to the chinese.
I made the choice to buy a UK manufactured fibre galvo laser for one reason and one reason only, and that reason is *not* that it is arguably 25% better across the board than anything the chinese can make for half the price or less, because it is possible to buy a chinese job that is near as fucking dammit as good across the board.
I bought a UK manufactured machine because *some* of my potential customer base have that as a tick box in *their* production paper trails, was the machine that did this process built and tested and calibrated and certified in the UK or Germany or Sweden, yes / no… and no is no deal.
It’s purely a paper trail exercise, but it means extra work that I can get, because nobody breaks the paper certification trail, and some of that shit ends up as components in quite exotic and expensive shit.
After the alibaba.co.uk (we already have the local to the EU bonded warehouses coming in) that last hurdle can be trivially overcome by assembling and testing that shit here in europe, and then it’s fucking game over.
Or this one:
EEVblog #1007 – Is a $25 Multimeter Any Good?
I like the most popular comment beneath it:
“Half of his engineering brain says yes, the other says it can’t be so. I smell smoke coming from his ears.”
Comment by guest — September 9, 2017 @ 3:05 am
The globalists have decided for some time now, the US is to be razed, and China to be the next plantation.
Comment by Undefined — September 10, 2017 @ 1:04 pm