All: please don't spoil this thread still further by taking this kind of bait. If you want a poster child for what happens, look below for a reductio ad absurdum in two steps: (1) bickering about wars of aggression (yes they were no they weren't); (2) relitigating Vietnam. If this is what you want to do on the internet, Hacker News is not the site you are looking for.
Well over a million people have been killed in U.S. wars of aggression (Vietnam, Iraq, etc.) and there are very direct ties between SV high tech funding and the Pentagon. Exhibit A: DARPA.[1] Even more direct than in China. A lot of what SV does is commercializing military technology developed at taxpayer expense. Autonomous vehicles and Siri are just a couple recent examples.[2][3]
[1] https://www.darpa.mil/about-us/darpa-history-and-timeline
1/3 of male African American are locked up in U.S. prisons. Think about that. One third.
[0](see page 9) https://todhartman.files.wordpress.com/2013/10/michel-foucau...
- whatshisface, but posted on an alt so I don't have to feel bad about points. ;)
That quote is buried deep in the article, but should be emphasised for anyone travelling in a Chinese-speaking country: WeChat is easier to use than Google Translate!
It also is worth emphasising for people developing iMessage, Skype, LINE, KakaoTalk, and other platforms, who seem to want to avoid "feature creep" by denying people this kind of functionality. Users like features.
If you're interested in learning Chinese, I wrote a program to do that, but I recommend chat-based translation tools like WeChat for temporary visitors.
WeChat is snappy and feels very responsive. It works every time. With Skype it's always a hassle to connect (Android and Windows), the app feels very heavy (Android).
I just started to use chat apps recently and frankly I was expecting better from MS, since I had good experiences with all their other products.
But first (with great distance) on the list of failed Microsoft products is their accounts. Ever tried to login into msdn? Even our sysadmin who's is daily job is to get this right fails many times. The UX is so confusing and ambiguous, it's not funny. Everytime I need to deal with it I am seriously considering moving away from the whole MS ecosystem.
Is WeChat somehow more convenient than this? It sounds like the same number of steps.
Edit: I think I understand now. It will translate the text inside the edit box.
Yes because everyone uses WeChat. So it is quick to talk to people inside an app that is already used be everyone.
- DiDi is the Uber of China. Wonderful UX, English language UI with automatic two-way translation of messages and support for western credit cards.
- AliPay & WeChat wallet are the primary methods of payment in China. You can enable a WeChat Wallet using a western credit card, but in most cases that card cannot be used for payments. You can have easily exchange cash for WeChat RMB, as other users can transfer RMB to your account free of charge. AliPay requires a local phone number & bank account (and no, the one you use for AliExpress does not work for mobile payments.)
- The subway system in Shenzhen, Shanghai & Beijing is really well maintained. You can use cash or Alipay/Wechat to pay.
- All foreign cell contracts pipe traffic through their local servers, so they automatically VPN through the Great Firewall.
- ProjectFI recently lost 99% of LTE coverage in China. T-Mobile cancelled their contract with China Unicom, and Nexus phones do not support the LTE bandwith China Mobile uses. You're stuck on the EDGE network 99% of the time.
- China Construction Bank opens up accounts for foreigners without Visa.
- One thing that was not mentioned in Karim's post: advanced manufacturing facilities. Try booking a tour: they can significantly alter what you think is possible.
After spending a few month in Shenzhen, seeing people coming and going, you realize that everyone has the same ideas about the same things. How to get around the firewall, catalog hqb, build their own pcba etc. Those things are of course harmless enough, but also missing the point.
Shenzhen is all about doing things and talking to people. Which is something a lot of western hackers seem to have forgot how to do in favor of fantasizing about things in various ways. The sooner people can get past that and start doing things the more they will get out of the experience.
How would I book a tour with advanced manufacturing facilities? Which ones you would recommend to start with?
Tell us a bit more about the tours of advanced manufacturing facilities if you can, I'm fascinated.
He means a VISA, not Visa the brand. In China Visa does not exist and everything is local banks. In many places, except an Apple Store (so I found out), US credit cards cannot be used.
You need a passport and in my case I asked a local co-worker to go with me for translation purposes just in case. This was good because they had issues with the length of my name and address info that needed to be worked around.
Do you have any more info on this?
And to people thinking of Shenzhen as a manufacturing city teeming with garage entrepreneurs, They fared no better. There are close to no factories remaining within the city centre today, except the special customs zone on the southern tip of Futian.
All of this is thanks to the witless mayor Wang Rong that took over the city in 2009. Some oh his first orders were to bulldoze factories and build glossy shopping malls, "weekend rest" hotels, and coffee shops with $10 a pop cappuccinos, so "we can live like in civilised Western countries"
Yes, it's highly "gentrified" now, with big electronics chains having huge stores (yes, more than one).
Other than that most stall owners just want to jump on the newest bandwagon (drones, VR, Bitcoin miners) or just sell iPhone accessories.
Maybe the most amazing thing are the ground floors of most buildings were the "raw" electronic components are actually sold. Or better word would be marketed. You are suppose to "window shop" there and place an order for bulk purchase afterwards.
It also seems 90% of these stalls are just for the marketing purpose. They sell mostly on Taobao. There's a never ending noise of yellow packing tape being wrapped around carton boxes.
OTOH I really liked their logistics services, ZTO in particular. They're cheap, reliable and have proper package tracking.
BTW, according to their five-years plans, China now considers that industry-wise, it is set and is planning to develop more its tertiary sector and R&D.
Wages will rise, so will cost of components. The race to the cheapest will now increasingly rely on automation rather than poor labor.
It's the same dynamic you'd expect in America or elsewhere. A combination of gentrification, government policies encouraging factories to move their pollution away, rising salaries in the city...
I run a little design + CM about an hour out of town. There's still ton's of manufacturing going on out here. We are right next to a big Foxconn and if you go out at the shift change in the morning it's like watching a wildebeest migration except everybody is wearing a embroidered Foxconn jacket. So both large and small scale going on.
I think the aspirations to live better here is great. There has been a big push to clean up pollution and the air is noticeably better than 3 years ago. We've had some rough patches dealing with painting suppliers closing down or having to relocate, but it's totally worth it to breathe easier.
Our situation is even somewhat similar to Silicon Valley/SF right now in that the younger professionals want to live downtown and it's sometimes challenging to recruit them from a boring place outside of town.
I don't think anywhere else is a "realer deal" for consumer grade manufacturing. Some stuff gets moved into the interior of China, but that's usually larger scale stuff that can justify planning out a complete campus. Other things move out to countries like Vietnam. But this area is still where you want to be if it's a new product or need access to prototyping capabilities you can't find elsewhere.
You best bet is to go to the few remaining factory districts in Shajing, north to the airport and look what garage factories are selling. Also try going to districts north to S3 if you are a try-hard. Stuff there is mostly generic light industry goods, and not electronics per se.
It may worth going further north to Dongguan, but I myself rarely ventured there.
But of course it depends on what you mean by "a Shenzhen".
When the US was a manufacturing superpower for most of the 20th century, it provided a way for ordinary people to earn a good living. Workers and suppliers pumped money into a wide variety of local businesses.
Starting around the early '80s, the manufacturing started moving overseas, especially to China. The Rust Belt region (where I'm from) never really recovered economically, although there are a few bright spots if you know where to look.
What did we do wrong and China do right, that the economic prosperity left us and went to them instead? How can we learn from their formula for success and adapt it for ourselves?
It sure seems like having a piece of the growth industries of the 21st century located in your country is a big piece of the puzzle in terms of providing well-paying jobs to our citizens and promoting their quality of life. Which should help with some of the political problems we've been having recently. How do we make it happen?
The repeal of American labor, environmental and copyright laws, to start.
That having said, is that really an issue in China? Wherever you go you get hacked?
When I went to China, I made sure to put all the "suspicious" stuff (like a complete Wikipedia dump) on a hidden and encrypted partition of my portable drive and worried that it might be discovered anyway. In the end nobody even looked at it, the English Wikipedia isn't blocked at all, and the Great Firewall is trivial to circumvent with the right VPN subscription.
We tried this for a few months. We would subscribe to a VPN that worked, we paid our yearly fee, and it stopped working the next month. We did this a few times before finally giving up, it is far from trivial, the GFW is real.
Not true. The Chinese government is cracking down on VPN providers and you can go to jail for 5 years and have to pay very high fees for running a VPN service.
And the Great Firewall is becoming more clever, they are probably using some learning algorithms as often you buy a VPN subscription which works great but it usually gets shut down in couple of weeks or months at the most.
In order to circumvent the firewall you will need to keep switching VPNs a lot and even then it's quite flaky.
"One thing I found problematic with WeChat is that unlike Hangout, for example, it doesn't store any of the conversations on the backend. There's apparently a “we're not spying on you” angle to this with regards to Tencent providing this service to users."
Yeah, but then just a couple of paragraphs before, they were mentioning how WeChat provides translation services inside the app. I highly doubt that this is being handled in the device itself.
Europe is a continent, Shenzhen is a city. Type `size of europe'[0] into Google and you get:
Europe
Continent
Population: 743.1 million (2015)
Area: 10.18 million km²
You have to compare a specific place in Europe to Shenzhen. Norway has the highest penetration on EVs in the world, for instance[1] so what if you compared Shenzhen with Oslo? The famous London black cab is going electric[2]. Here in Ireland we have been using contactless debit transactions for years in practically every place–when a retail spot doesn't support it you kind of look at them as if they're from the past[3]. By way of example, at a recent intimate book launch I went to by a boutique publisher they used a portable handheld card swiper because people don't necessarily carry cash and it would be too inconvenient to ask them to go to an ATM.
Yes, I think the pace of innovation in Europe could be quicker but both the LHC[4] and ITER[5] are based in Europe (France) which is kind of amazing because there are 43 other countries in the world _bigger_ than France and France is only the second largest[6] country in Europe (taking into account European Russia[7] which dwarfs it).
I sometimes think people forget both how small Europe is and how varied both culturally and developmentally–from the Arctic Circle in the north to the Mediterranean in the south, from the Atlantic in the West to the Urals and Black Sea in the East. When people say Europe sometimes they mean the EU which is not the same thing at all! There are 47 states that make up the Council of Europe[8], there are 28 in the EU give or take a Brexit. When (if?) the UK leaves the EU it'll still be bound by the European Court for Human Rights[9]! Sometimes when people say Europe they might actually be referring to Western Europe which is historically inaccurate and a bit culturally myopic to put it kindly.
TL;DR–comparing the whole of Europe to a city is bonkers.
edit: added links to the LHC and ITER :)
[0] https://www.google.ie/search?q=size+of+europe
[1] https://www.autoblog.com/2018/01/03/ev-hybrid-car-sales-norw...
“Pure electric cars and hybrids accounted for 52 percent of all new car sales in 2017 in Norway against 40 percent in 2016, the independent Norwegian Road Federation (OFV) said.”
[2] https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/5/16704060/london-zero-emis...
[3] http://www.moneyguideireland.com/contactless-payments-in-ire...
[4] https://home.cern/topics/large-hadron-collider
[5] https://www.iter.org/factsfigures
[6] https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...
[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Russia
“Russia is not proportionately populated between its larger Asian portion, which contains about 23% of the country's population, and its smaller European portion, which contains about 77%. The European portion contains about 110 million people out of Russia's total population of about 144 million in an area covering nearly 4,000,000 km2 (1,500,000 sq mi); (making it by far the largest European country) an average of 27.5 persons per km2 (70 per sq mi).”
[8] https://www.coe.int/en/web/about-us/structure
[9] http://www.e-ir.info/2017/07/27/implications-of-brexit-for-t...
> One of the very first things I did was get my hands on Bunnie Huang's “The Essential Guide to Electronics in Shenzhen” (TEGES from here on forward) off of Adafruit's site
I did run into some trouble finding an ATM that accepted my card. I did not want to trade a lot of currency since it was only a day trip, and not knowing if I would buy anything at all, or how much. There were many ATM's, though it is hard to find anywhere in China banks that are compatible with American cards. Not impossible, just far fewer than other countries.
WeChat is a must all over China. They use it for everything! Though I haven't figured out how to get money onto it to use the pay feature, which they love to use. I think you have to have a China Bank account to tie it to your WeChat, or have someone with CNY who gives/transfer it to you from their account.
I had another friend doing brew-tanks. Same story. The real deal, if you can find it, will invest time and energy to get you to the product you want at world-class level.
I don't doubt its a sick sad world out there, and scary at times but with some basic human decency and a realistic budget, manufacturing in China wants to talk to you.
If you want to cut corners, or shave price to the bone, I am sure you will find people who are going to shave quality and compliance to match. If you can price ahead of the floor, you can find really good, entrepreneurial people to deal with.
The brewtank guy wound up in delay because of new Chinese pollution compliance checks. Don't assume everything coming out of china is toxic lead, they are also trying to get on top of bad supply chain behaviour.
Our first foray in Shenzhen was made once we found a small company that had a Mediatek based 3G SOM and was willing to help us develop our hardware from there; they suggested that it was the best option. Two years, several stays and a final prototype later, we have learnt why it would have been almost impossible for us to successfully get to a functioning prototype from Nairobi; especially with our budget. For one, the we had direct help from manufacturers, who our hosts had to speak to in Mandarin. With drivers for out custom touch panel, we still needed a visit to the IC manufacturer for some configurations to be fixed. We also had such great help on mechanical design; here, I must admit, we had been completely clueless.
The one thing I can say for sure, in China relationships help; greatly!! We were worried about changing our LCD because the one we're using has come to it's End Of Life. We were then introduced to a factory that was to make us a replacement. Turns out they can make the new LCD use the same exact connections as the one we had before. So no change in our circuit, and support for any change in our code. For us, it was less having a plan and more serendipity though.
Eek!