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Viajames
118
Jun 14, 2019
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I appreciate the time you took to put into this. There is a lot here. Your not wrong on a lot. My midwestern friend. You have been lied to about a few important details. There were are and continue to be “THEFT” not “clones”... let’s see you make something by the sweat of your brow, have a “craftsman” in China steel that idea and produce it 20x cheaper than you because of their refusal to adhere to global copyright law. Yes a lot of American makers use them. (And profit!) Yes... a few that are on par or exceed manufacturers that are supposably the best in the west.
Your dismissal of the clones as “ok” however because they are for the rest of the world not us in the US.
I’m going to let that just wash over you a min.. your a smart guy. You know why that’s B.S.
Im not trying to change your mind either... but you may want to look into a couple companies like Kizer.
before you bang anymore drums comrade.
Im sure their nose is clean now, but it wasn’t.. the info is out there
Look for the $, there’s not much out there than can beat a Reate/We, especially some of their IN HOUSE designs, so I’m not coming down on the side of boycotting China. There are good companies out there doing good things.. there are knifenuts out there that just happen to be living in China.
I have a couple I call friend as a matter of fact.
The bottom line is China is, and always will be our competitor.. it’s ok.. we don’t all have to get along and sing Kumbiya.
reswright
3850
Jun 14, 2019
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ViajamesFirst off: thanks. I know there's people out there that've been grinding their teeth reading what I'm writing, but staying silent, and that gets us nowhere. You spoke up and now we're talking about it, which is what really needs to happen here. I appreciate it.
"let’s see you make something by the sweat of your brow, have a “craftsman” in China steel that idea and produce it 20x cheaper than you because of their refusal to adhere to global copyright law. "
There's a few things I can say here.
The very first: Been there, done that. I know what it's like to make something and have others copy substantial portions of my work. This isn't theoretical for me. And I'm ok with how it works, largely because I know I won't be changing it substantially no matter what I do. If I wanted to i could lawyer up and try and claw more money out of anyone who's ever made money using one of my ideas, but I'm doing ok as it is, and I value my free time, and generally speaking I understand the idea that good ideas spread because people see that they're useful to have. The truth is, the better your work is, the more people will copy it.
Now, if someone signs my name to the document and represents their work as mine? That's a problem, and it's also actionable, and I'll lawyer up. I can win that fight. But almost all the hullabaloo about cloning ends up being over knives that no court of law would conclude are actually clones and at the end of the day are legally gray. They don't have fake labels, they have different dimensions, whatever. And there's no winning the fight unless you're a lawyer, for whom the fight is always lucrative. Some people care less about their quality of life than whether someone somewhere thinks they were taken advantage of, and will commit to spending their days in a courtroom and their money on legal bills as a result. I prefer the life I live.
Second, if one person makes you an item at a certain price, and someone else makes it 20 times cheaper and sells it to you 20 times cheaper, you're missing the elephant in the room: the first person was blatantly ripping you off... and the second person's ripping the first person off, not you. You want to talk about knowing something isn't fair? You probably already understand that that's not fair, and that it's not just a matter of one person being a simple honest businessman doing their thing, doot-dee-doo, then along comes a bad Chinese businessman and just because they don't care about copyright law and are completely amoral scum they can somehow magically make the knife 20 times cheaper than the simple honest businessman. There's got to be a physical reason they can make that knife 20 times cheaper. And I'll cut to the chase for you: the reason is always that the original maker of the knife was making an obscene profit margin. It is never anything else. If it was, the Chinese wouldn't have been able to make it 20x cheaper. Understand there's a difference in what you have to pay people in China, and the cost of liability and so on, but it doesn't come close to amounting to that 20x multiplier.
If you're talking about some more reasonable amount of savings, then maybe you're talking about an honest original manufacturer that was trying to give folks a decent deal while they made an honest profit. But you aren't really talking about that. That is not the problem we generally face in the West. The reason that the Chinese prices are so different from ours is that ours have been inflated for a while.
The third point is simple -- you are engaging in binary thinking and fitting me into your reality. You sit there saying that because I point all these things out about clones, I must be telling people cloning is fine. And out comes all this other stuff that you've assumed, like I don't understand that the Chinese compete with us and that I'd rather sing a folk song with them. You're talking to a caricature of someone in your head that you think must be me, because I didn't shit iron ingots and egg rolls over the fact that the Chinese appropriate a lot of designs. Some one, you think, must have lied to me. Your midwestern friend.
The truth is, I live in a morally complex world and am aware of that fact. Everything comes with a trade off. I don't conclude that cloning is 'OK' any more than I conclude that it's OK that the people who own US brands shut down all their US production and moved their production overseas. Or that it's OK for a business to spend more money on marketing sizzle than they do on the quality of materials they work with, like CRKT selling AUS-8 folders for $100. Or that it's ok for a company like Chris Reeve Knives to no longer even employ Chris Reeve and go on making money off his name. (His ex owns the company now.) Or the way all these companies cheat on their taxes and hide income overseas -- you wanna talk about ripping off Americans, there it is. Dude, there's a billion things wrong with the industries we're saddled with. These people aren't our buddies, they tend to see us as suckers who blow their money instead of saving it, even as they devote millions to advertisements designed to get us to buy more stuff we don't need just yet.
And the Chinese aren't our buddies either; it just so happens that due to the economics, they're in a position to offer us a much better deal than we've been getting. Our businesses got caught with their hands in a cookie jar by the time they'd mostly emptied it out, and they would have you go to bat for them while they finish getting the last of the cookies.
I just propose being a little more clear eyed about seeing who's helping me and who's been content to bleed me dry my whole life when people start beating their chest about China. It's not about friends and enemies, it's about reality and seeing past the haze of social nonsense, trying to do the right and fair thing while not being someone else's sucker.
Here's an example:
Every time you buy a Spyderco (a company whose knives I adore and own) you are buying a knife from a manufacturer with an American presence, and that's good. But you're also pouring profits into a company that a long ways back decided to start phasing out those American jobs and now makes the majority of their knives overseas. You're pouring profits into a company that is literally standing up Chinese companies to do their OEM work for them. That's ALSO unavoidably true.
So if you buy a Spyderco are you telling me that you favor the death of American labor and think it's 'OK'? I think what you'd tell me is that you're choosing to focus on other aspects of it, like the fact that Spyderco still makes some knives with American tools and labor in Colorado.
Well, that's where I am with the top quality tier of Chinese knife makers.
We could also have a conversation about how the West only seems to give a damn about knockoffs when it's the Chinese doing them, and how Coke and Pepsi, Miller and Bud, Chevy and Ford, clothing brands, food brands, all knock each other off all day long, seizing their competitor's idea and doing a version themselves, and the worst we do is roll our eyes at it instead of frothing at the mouth over a foreign threat. And we could have a conversation about how when a movie comes out, or a new TV show comes out, or a hot new musician comes out, and strikes it big, that suddenly US copycats will appear where there were none before and suddenly everyone will be trying that formula out, whatever it is. For that matter we could have a conversation about how many people the US government and intelligence community spend their working lives cracking Chinese systems and stealing Chinese data (that's another area where people only hear about the Chinese cracking into our systems, but the truth is, they're rank fucking amateurs compared to us, we wrote the book. We have businesses in the corridor between DC and Baltimore that know as much about the state of Chinese research as the Chinese do.) There are many other conversations we could have on this topic.
reswright
3850
Jun 14, 2019
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reswright"but you may want to look into a couple companies like Kizer. before you bang anymore drums comrade. Im sure their nose is clean now, but it wasn’t.. the info is out there"
There's two ways I can respond to a statement like this.
The first is that if you want to start looking at companies whose nose wasn't clean at all back in the day, and I mean at all, you're talking about a lot of US businesses too. And we can start comparing corporate atrocities -- but I don't know that you're going to like how that conversation goes either. We've got some real humdingers under our belt, in America we have some illicit corporate activity that makes the Chinese look like tossers. To me most of this is a given, and I'm really not interested in double standards.
The second is you probably want to have a look at the mixed messaging you're putting out. Do you want the companies to stop cloning knives and start focusing on more original designs? Why would they bother to do that just to make you happy if when they do so, you, and people like you, consider then no better now - even if their 'nose is clean' these days? I mean, what did you just say?
No one's asking you to give them a cookie, but when you don't shift an inch on the issue when they do change, you're just another part of the problem, you're the guy with a sense of entitlement now. The truth is you aren't going to be happy with them no matter what they do, short of rolling belly up and letting American businesses take them over. You move the goalposts every time someone kicks the ball. If you want these companies to act the way you think they should act, then understand that what you're doing gives them no incentive to do so.
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