The last phone I bought was $2,000 so buying a Librem 5 for that much is basically me paying the same amount. Doesn’t really seem that expensive to me when the competition is the same cost.
Looking at the war in Ukraine and the works of Ray Dalio, I get the impression that we, in the Western democracies, should urgently start pushing towards electronics made in the free democratic world.
My opinion is that China could easily stop this war if it wanted. If China threatens Russia with economic sanctions, Russia is absolutely gone. The whole game of Russia is that in case of western sanctions it is going to sell raw materials to China and buy ready goods back from China. Without EU, Japan, and China not even a Lada car (from the current portfolio) could be built or sold in Russia.
So China could in my opinion stop the war. But it chooses not to. It chooses not to support the West and the markets that made China possible. It chooses to save Putin’s a**. And this is deeply worrying for me.
We should stop buying cheep and move towards buying less goods but made under more responsible conditions.
The painful thing is that I doubt that this could happen volantarily. People love cheap goods. So state intervention will be needed for a large transition.
Do you really want China to set that precedent? “Do as I think you should or you get nothing. Do it quickly or I raise prices.”
I don’t get your point.
We are currently in a situation where most of the World (140 countries) is getting blackmailed by Russia just because they have nukes (under control of a mentally ill person), in a World where the UN is de facto incapacitated and totally helpless. China can stop the war and you would prefer that China does not stop the war? This just does not make any sence.
Yes countries do pressure other countries to behave. This is what we do with Russia at the moment. It will be definitively better if we succeed stopping Russia with economic pressure with the help of China than failing to do so without the help of China. Because if we fail with economic pressure, the day where we will need to use military force will come and the price will be much higher.
It gets too off-topic. My point was that in my opinion we need a shift towards goods made in free domocratic countries like the US, EU, Japan, and other in order to avoid placing dangerous unpredictable countries in too strong economic position which could let them believe that they could afford to start wars (like it happened with Russia).
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