I often hear, “You should never cheap out on a good office chair, shoes, underpants, backpack etc…” but what are some items that you would feel OK to cheap out on?
This can by anything from items such as: expensive clothing brands to general groceries.
If you buy a flagship for the cameras, buy last year’s flagship second hand. You will end up spending half the money. Plus more or less all flagships have atleast 4 years of security updates, so you can use it for 3 years or longer comfortably.
Flagship cameras have started to peak with this year, atleast on the Chinese end. American ones have to catchup for a few years. And in 3 years or so, we could see them trickle down to budget midrange $300 phones, atleast outside of USA, where anticapitalist freedom exists.
This is odd to see in the same comment.
Well, China is evidently not focused on money grubbing and wallet lynching, the way Western capitalist economies are, so…
Yeah, but Chinese private companies are still that, private companies that are profit driven. There’s exciting and even cheap to buy stuff coming out of China, like IEMs for example, but it’s still a good ideia to keep expectations in check for the motivation of these companies.
Being profit driven is a meaningless term. Apple and Hifiman are by no means equally profit driven. If that seems like an odd comparison, Apple and Huawei make equally well polished smartphones, watches and products, yet Huawei is about 20x smaller in net worth.
China is responsible for allowing most of the world to be able to buy and own good quality products without the 10-20x markups that American companies tend to have. They have captured over half the world’s EV market and are scaling up with EV cars they are making, with very affordable and safe ones being made. They are making everything, not just IEMs. They make kilobuck top end headphones that rival Grados.
I agree with you, I was just giving a simple example of more simple product, I didn’t mean to imply that the relations are exactly the same to the ones in a capitalist country, neither that China isn’t responsible for basically all the production in the world and affordable access to said production.
Still, while most private companies can’t just do whatever they want like in the rest of the world, the fact of the matter is that profit is still the primary concern for a lot of consumer products made in China, and it’s something worth to keep in mind. The existence of gacha games like Genshin are a perfect example of this.
No other country has kneecapped its own industries, especially video gaming industry. There are others like real estate, private tuition and other sectors which Chinese government clamped down on, and is well known to hang corrupt millionaires and billionaires. Meanwhile, such people in West hang (used to) around on Epstein’s private island and do such stuff and are worshipped.
Genshin, despite being a gacha, is nowhere as greedy as something like Dokkan. Dokkan makes 16% revenue of Dragonball franchise IP total revenue. I am a F2P Dokkan player for almost 7 years now, not spent a dime, but if you chose to buy ingame currency for summoning units, one multisummon costs $40. And the banner rates are 0.5-1% per new unit. That is not apologia for Genshin though, as I never played Genshin or Honkai, and gacha lootbox/DLC/IAP gaming industry is nasty, no matter where it is. It is not sensible to blame China for gacha, when Japan created gacha, and Western gaming companies are infamous for IAP and DLC tactics for quarter profitmaxxing.
Again, I agree and I’m aware of the stuff you talk in the first paragraph. I’m from Lemmygrad, I defend China as an AES country.
Now for the second paragraph, I’m not trying to blame China for gacha, I’m just pointing it out as an issue that also exists there. That comes with their acceptance of capital, and is something they can be criticized for. My criticism is not to belittle them, but because I believe they can do better.
There was recent news of China clamping down on lootboxes and predatory monetization in gaming, which would be great and would set a precedent for the rest of the world, but last I saw they walked back on it.
I don’t play Genshin, I only used it as an example, but I play League Of Legends, which is owned by Riot Games that is owned by Tencent and recently there has been the inclusion of gacha mechanics for skins that heavily relies on fomo for people to spend money on, and it’s really expensive. Meanwhile Riot also just fired 530 people worldwide and killed multiple projects and iniciatives inside the company, while starving other projects too. This is a billion dollar worth company owned by Tencent, and it all deserves criticism like any other games and companies.
Gachas and lootboxes are addictive and money grubbing. You cannot do much about them. Casinos, gambling and lootboxes have existed for thousands of years, with not just capital but objects, kingdoms and even people used as bets. Now in modern world its just some currency bills as bets.
I have a principle set in stone as a belief and basis for all things in life and beyond, Pareto’s principle. I think morality, communism/altruism and all these things are also not 100% applicable, but only 80% (or 85, 90% whatever). So we will always be stuck with that 10-20% of capitalism, for example. And beyond that is diminishing returns. It is better to accept that, and work towards efficiency and optimal results.
Excuse my ignorance, why would I need to worry about security updates on a camera?
I was speaking about phones… and I accidentally ended up with a Freudian slip, because smartphones are more like cameras with a calling ability nowadays.