Boycott US
Overview:
The community dedicated to boycotting the US until they stop fascism, restore full democracy and start following international law.
Americans have a moral obligation to resist Donald Trump and project 2025 at every turn.
America is a flawed democracy currently being ruled by oligarchs. Stop the backslide! Dont let America become the next Hungary.
America needs to challenge the court rulings of citizens united v. fec and shelby county v. holder, protect the media, implement independent district drawing, and the single transferable vote so they don't end up having people stay home in life-changing elections because they cannot vote for their favourite candidate.
Join 50501.chat to fight back!
Related communities:
Boycott:
!buycanadian@lemmy.ca
Activism:
!antitrumpalliance@lemmy.world
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Being an Asian having grown up in Europe, I can say that Westerners have a short term, profiteering mindset. We think too much if the earnings for the next quarter will keep the shareholders happy. There is no long term planning and vision. I find Western businesses afraid of leaving their initial core industry, even if that industry is going the way of the dodos like fossil fuel cars.
I can't exactly assess Chinese industries much, but Japanese businesses are excellent and unafraid with diversifying away from their initial offerings, and reaching out to a completely separate field. Nintendo was a card manufacturing company but is now a videogame titan. Fujifilm went from photo and film to biotechnology. Sony just recently eked out to finance and investing. Western companies don't really do this, but instead waste money by fighting tooth and nail to keep dying businesses alive. Western companies are obsessed with making money now, while East Asian companies prioritise existence.
That We is pulling a lot of weight and i'd mostly translate it as C-suits and management.
Hitachi makes consumer electronics and heavy industrial construction machinery.
But somehow Ford can only make F150s and Mustangs any more...
Mitsubishi is another heavy weight.
Ford Aerospace was a division of Ford in the 1950s-1970s that made missiles and satellites. Look at the backgrounds of the corporate leadership, the 4th generation Fords have most of the votes. The CEO's background is in sales and marketing.
And they miss obvious things too. How did Sears, a company that became famous and hide by offering magazines to show the cost of their goods to everyone before that was a thing, lose to an online bookstore? How did a video rental place (Blockbuster) not see the obvious benefit of mailing DVDs and then later internet streaming and get beat by a no name company like netflix?
Probably exactly as you say. It would have cost a year or two of missed quarterly earnings as they entered new markets, so they missed the opportunities entirely.
Like most successful companies of the past, they were bought by a hedge fund or real estate fund and milked for any cash before assets were disposed. There are plenty more big name companies about to die because their business is no longer the product they made, it is only return for shareholder.
That one baffles me. They were doing catalog based mail order since the start of their business.
They should have been in the perfect position to compete with what Amazon has become. They already had all the infrastructure in place. All they needed was a decent website version of their existing catalog with a simple ordering method, and they utterly failed at that.
They had online ordering years before amazon was even a thought, but the high ups canned it saying that the internet was just a passing fad. They put themselfs out of business while saying they knew better then the customer the whole while.
The Zaibatsu model has different incentives, particularly when they're jockeying for position with American internationals on their own turf.
They're very good at undercutting American industry. But I'd consider the Japanese cartel model flawed in other ways - miserable places to actually work for, agonizingly patriarchal, debilitating drinking/drug culture, zero work life balance, and the pay is shit.
That is true. But I mean branching out is something that Western companies should not be afraid of. EV and renewables are no brainers; but legacy firms in the fossil fuel industries are spending millions to prevent change and would rather see the world burn.
Although, to several Western company's credit, they do branch out. Many European energy utilities have mostly diversified away from fossil fuels. The centuries old state-backed Danish company, Orsted, completely got rid of their fossil fuel mix, and transitioned 100% to renewable. But Trump cancelling their projects in US East Coast ruined their short term profitability. In any case, Orsted is firm with their full transition to renewable energy.
When you see reports come out from fossil fuel companies, they quite literally describe "$X trillion of hydrocarbons in the ground".
Europe only really has the Baltic as a reserve. They've been cut off from much of the Middle East by decades of war.
So, unlike the US, which has become an oil exporter for the last twenty years, Europeans either went woke or went broke.
Those fossil fuel companies are trying to invoke the greed in us, but for most people it's not really working with respect to climate change. I won't consider myself an optimist, bu the fact that renewable energy and EVs are growing says that people really do care.
In theory, the "invisible hand of free market" ought to pick out the most innovative and profitable companies, while those who refuse to keep up with the times vanish. But in practice, the legacy companies, despite their business model becoming obsolete, don't want to go away quietly. They spend money to spread misinformation to put down cutting edge technologies and business models, despite growing market demand like green technology.
Even if fossil fuels still has some value, is it really worth it in the long run to extract them and cause mass extinction? Who will be the customers when society collapse? As someone asked before, "what if we improved society for nothing?"
It's the result of their mythical beginnings. Creatures made out of mud, while you Asians are descendants of the dragon god. Or something. I dunno I am just a random person on the internet