Slashdot Mirror
Apple Not Allowed To Open Stores In India (reuters.com)
ffkom writes: Reuters reports: "India has said Apple Inc must meet a rule obliging foreign retailers to sell at least 30 percent locally-sourced goods if it wishes to open stores in the country, a senior government official told Reuters. A change in legislation last year exempted foreign retailers selling high-tech goods from the rule, which states 30 percent of the value of goods sold in the store should be made in India. However, Apple's products were not considered to be in this category, said the official, who has direct knowledge of the matter." Now just imagine what Apple stores in the U.S. would look like if 30% of their offerings had to be made in the US... "They did ask for a waiver but didn't provide any material on record to justify it. The decision was taken only after a thorough examination of their application," the source said. Apple planned to open at least three stores in India by the end of 2017. Separate sources said Apple talked with the Indian government about a relaxation of the rule before it filed an application to open stores in the country in January. In a report from The Wall Street Journal (Warning: source may be paywalled), one of India's government officials said, "We are sticking to the old policy. We want local sourcing for job creation. You can't have a situation where people view India only as a market. Let them start doing some manufacturing here." Currently, Apple sells its products "through a network of Indian-owned distribution companies and retailers."
Apple will open its wallet and everything will change. Indian bureaucrats and officials care about one thing: bribe money.
These policies are clearly jingoistic and nativistic. Why should the people of one country be privileged over the people of any other? Just because they were born there? That's not thinking globally. That's the kind of thinking that leads people to believe that building walls is the solution to problems.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Sad to see that India hasn't fully thrown off the economic ignorance that stifled their growth from independence until the late 1980s. Protectionism is nearly as stupid as price controls.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Every time I price out, e.g., a Lenovo Carbon X1, to match the specs of a Macbook Air; the Lenovo costs more.
False dichotomy. If you were to spec a Macbook to match the specs of a Lenovo, you would likewise end up with a more expensive product.
You're pre-supposing that the Macbook Air has the ultimate feature set which others should match.
Others may want features like built-in HDMI, clip-on batteries, separate mic and headphone ports, changeable batteries and or HDs, a three button touchpad, upgradeable RAM or docking stations. Only by disregarding such choices because the Macbook doesn't offer them can you do a comparison to anything else. That will then be a biased comparison, favoring the Macbook Air even before you start.
If you're unemployed, you can buy zero products.
Correct. This is why the steady growth of technology across the past 200 years in America has supplied vast wealth with 4%-10% unemployment rates, while sharp steps forward in technology without uncorking any form of scarcity (e.g. the Industrial Revolution; automating every task at all McDonalds; self-driving cars) have caused history's greatest economic collapses.
To be short and imprecise: technical progress causes transitional unemployment, and an economy is kept healthy by maximizing the rate of re-employment and stretching out the rate of transition to labor-reducing methods; this is optimally performed by keeping workers competitive with the technology which replaces them and highly-employable. The most effective way to keep workers highly-employable is to minimize their proportional wage-labor cost; technical progress tends to do that, as one employee's time handles the task of several employees thanks to new technology, thus that employee's wages are divided more finely across more units of product. Basic income schemes such as a Citizen's Dividend, tax plans which reduce payroll and sales taxes, and progressive taxes which reduce working-class taxes as the income gap widens address both ends of the equation.
These are also more highly skilled professions, for which most of "the labor freed up from the farm" is likely unqualified. Who covers the cost of retraining?
This is not entirely true for two reasons.
First, we're exchanging numbers. A healthy economy has 4%-8% unemployment in the labor force; low unemployment leads to labor shortages (which staggers the economy), and high unemployment reduces the consumer base. If you unemploy 0.2% of your labor force during one year, then the new jobs may very well go to some of the other 4% or so who are already unemployed. In the United States, unemployment insurance only pays for 6 months, which means our social safety net relies on continuously exchanging out workers onto the unemployment line and bringing in other workers who were previously receiving unemployment aid (my Citizen's Dividend addresses this directly, because it's a reasonable policy, but a sub-optimal one; unemployment limits are negative punishment for not getting a job, while a Citizen's Dividend converts this to positive reinforcement by eliminating the negative punishment associated with *losing* your unemployment payment when you do get hired, thus any employment *only* makes you more wealthy).
This, plus the nature of changing markets and a constantly-developing workforce, means the workforce training occurring among new labor market entrants (college students) changes to follow the changing technology trends, and so the retraining you cite is somewhat integrated. Again: you probably don't want to eliminate 5% of jobs in 2-3 years; that's a pretty high turn-over rate, and the economy won't often create new jobs that quickly (the Information Age was a highly-complex example).
Second, much of the labor isn't highly-skilled labor. We've created a lot of blunt customer service jobs, truck loading/unloading jobs, cashier operators, and the like. Part of our growth is more grocery baggers and burger flippers; and we will necessarily want to replace our highly-skilled industrial machine operators with whatever moron can babysit a nearly-self-operating machine designed to be operated by whatever moron you can pull off the street. Look at most network software and hardware now: I could teach a completely computer-illiterate idiot to install Ubuntu and load arbitrary Web applications (OwnCloud, Gitlab, Wordpress, etc.) in maybe an hour; and the curious and persistent could figure it out on their own in half a day. My job as a skilled computer systems technician and engineer has become roughly equivalent to burger flipping.
So we get a major growth in retail, shipping, and other low-skilled labor, while our skilled professional
Support my political activism on Patreon.