100%. Amazon actually has a sizable robotics presence in Boston. It would have been great for Boston job market and there are actually a handful of companies based out of MA including BD. You really need a cluster of companies to strengthen an industry. I mean see biotech in Kendall if you need an example.

Every time I hear someone applaud China for doing it cheaper and better, you don’t actually know that long-term. Technology goes into China but rarely comes out of it. Meaning they like to “transfer” IP in exchange for cheap labor but they don’t share a lot of things. There’s a very real long-term price to pay for that.

How do we recover from this?

Five years ago you'd be called sinophobic for suggesting we do something to stop bleeding industries to China. (My wife is Asian ffs, I'm not racist.) Yet we already saw how this had happened to Canada with Nortel, etc.

China wants every industry it can have. If we give up technological salients, we won't be able to get them back. China has so many advantages - manufacturing, chemicals, materials, electronics. They now have better experience than we do with design and engineering.

The outcome of this happening broadly and at scale is that high paying US jobs will disappear and the country will slide into economic stagnation.

You wouldn't hire a robotics or mechatronics engineer in the US. There would only be small bespoke jobs. The vast majority of supply would come from China where everything is both vertically and horizontally integrated. Cheap, fast, better. These career sectors will shrink and atrophy. There won't be enough talent, jobs, or pay to support building new companies, meaning we're dead in the water and that industry is dead to us.

We need to do something fast. It'll be gone within a generation if we don't.

I don't have anything against Chinese people. I just want America to dominate or be competitive in enough key industries to keep us all employed and growing. For our own economic security and insurance.

> (My wife is Asian ffs, I'm not racist.)

I’m not saying you are a racist but this statement never really holds much weight.

I’ve met plenty of western expats in Asia that are married to locals, have mixed raced children, and yet still say the most racist things about the locals.

I was so angry at this.

I want Amazon and Google to be broken up, but not in this category or along with these lines. This wasn't going to create some household appliance monopoly. Amazon has plenty of competition, and Roomba was already behind the curve.

Now America is out of this market category. A category we invented. This felt like our last toehold in consumer robotics.

Maybe one day you'll realize the contradictions in this post and think about how you cheered for things that led to this.

I doubt it though

The contradiction is that breaking up Google and Amazon would also destroy categories of business where the United States is dominant over other countries.

Prevent them from buying their competitors, for sure, but don't kid yourself into thinking that there are many neat ways to parcel these companies up into neat little independent business units. There is at best a very small number of ways to do this and the government will not get it right, just look at their most recent attempt with Google to strip out Chrome of all things.

Just to be clear on my stance,I agree that blocking the irobot deal was absurd. Context matters in a big way, clearly they were struggling and were basically alone in the market as an American company.

I think you also need to apply that context to Google and Amazon and consider whether the government would do so wisely.

The contradiction is it’s just your opinion where to draw the lines which differs from Elizabeth Warren’s. You think your lines are good and hers are bad. She doesn’t. Many other interested parties would like half of it and want to change the other half.

The only way out is to reject centrally-planned line-drawing.

In the theoretical limit, a single monopoly owns and dictates everything. That's bad.

In today's mega-conglomerate market duopoly situations, these companies' cash piles and revenues are so big that they can lumber into any industry they want to, dump on the market, kill healthy incumbents, and then leave shittier products and economics in their wake. They get to use their massive "platforms" as taxation dragnets. The platforms themselves barely innovate, yet they rake in enormous revenue streams by taxing all other participants and being the central connection point for all economies.

Is it healthy that we only have two smartphone providers? That they can extort every industry - including crazy unrelated industries like fintechs, automotive, various entertainment industries, etc.?

Is it healthy that the "URL bar" now means Google search in 95% of the panes of glass humans use to access the internet? That a search for a company's products are now a competitive bidding zone where every market participant is taxed on basic branding?

Healthy capitalism should be brutally competitive. It uses regulation to ensure companies do not grow too big to escape evolutionary pressures. Google, Apple, and Amazon ought to be sweating - not sitting by the pool, relaxing. And they certainly shouldn't be able to become invasive species in other markets when their entry amounts to dumping.

I love capitalism. A healthy dose of antitrust regulation makes it more distributed and less antifragile. It makes sure lots of stakeholders can pursue lots of objectives rather than concentrated labs that are merely the lavish luxuries of titans. It prevents laziness and ossification by forcing everyone to be nimble.

You know who else is a monopoly? The Federal government.

I have received better treatment from the worst monopoly companies like Comcast etc than the services from the US government.

I think half the problem was the proposed Amazon acquisition. I was actually very seriously considering one of the newest Roomba models at the time it was announced. I decided to buy another brand because I knew amazon would 100% use it to spy on me.

Now instead China is using it to spy on people. Glad I didn't buy one I guess.

Elizabeth Warren is proud of blocking this deal:

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/amazon-irobot-deal-collapse-room...

That old bat is the enemy of any kind of US technical progress.

No. Enforcing anti-trust law is critical for healthy markets. Healthy markets support technological progress through competition.

How is Chinese market consolidation a healthier market outcome here?

Opposing one purchaser does not imply supporting another purchaser. I don't know the details of this specific transaction, but I would guess the Chinese buyer does not have the same market power that Amazon does, so isn't running afoul of antitrust law. It's also possible Warren is opposed to this purchase, too, but no longer has the influence to stop it.

> Opposing one purchaser does not imply supporting another purchaser

Opposing the merger in this case necessarily meant embracing iRobot going out of business. Their financial position was clear, and no one else was in that business vertical but iRobot and Chinese companies. So either iRobot folds and the market is owned by Chiense companies, or iRobot folds and its IP is bought by Chinese companies.

> but I would guess the Chinese buyer does not have the same market power that Amazon does

In home robotics? They own the whole market.

> Warren is opposed to this purchase, too, but no longer has the influence to stop it.

Warren is too blindly ideological and frankly stupid to have pieced this together.

It’s not the government’s job to punish them either, and in this case Warren destroyed the jobs of many of her constituents.

Ahh yes workplace democracy, famously tenable for high tech companies.

It is absolutely the the role of government to regulate commerce and establish competitive markets (note the lack of the word free here).

I also have zero faith in tech leadership as they have been the major driver of mass misery across humanity. Not only should they be stripped of their positions in their companies, but leadership should be directly given to the workers.

It's the only way to right to the wrong. If it's good enough for executives (voting for other executives, pay packages, and company direction), it's also good enough for workers.

How did iRobot hurt anyone? It seems like Warren hurt their workers by denying them the opportunity to keep their jobs. Moreover the whole home robotics industry no resides in China where the companies are run in an even more authoritarian fashion.

You're assuming the deal was anti-competitive. A lot of the time, the process is the punishment.

As an American with a strong personal interest (kids) in keeping the country strong and competitive in the future, it seems bizarre to cheer for our largest adversary to gain advantages over us.

I also would have preferred to keep it in the country, but the fact is that Amazon does more harm and is a larger threat to Americans and your children than China is. Hence "Of those two choices... I pick China."

I would love for there to have been more than those two options, but this is where we ended up after decades of not enforcing anti-trust law, thanks in no small part to Amazon.

>Amazon does more harm and is a larger threat to Americans and your children than China is

Yeah, I'm going to need some examples as to how Amazon is worse than China.

See downthread comment[1], and please keep in mind the context of this conversation is specifically, "Amazon does more harm and is a larger threat to Americans than China is".

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46277647

Chinese doctrine explicitly has labeled America as the enemy for 10-20 years, with a goal of taking a democracy by force (after crushing dissent in HK and taking it over earlier than promised), and steals the West’s IP, and manipulates American businesses, and is actively committing a genocide for the past decade.

That's all pretty hand wavey and abstract, not very convincing (for example, I'm pretty sure China is not committing a genocide in the US, and Western IP law is arguably not worth much respect anyway). I'm not saying China is without problems, I'm just saying they're less harmful to Americans than Amazon is.

You’re claiming that documented and active IP theft and anti-democracy and enemy-action doctrine is handwavy and better than a tax paying business that supports democracy and that is not trying to undermine the west? You’re wrong

I similarly can't understand how you can look at the US over the last 10-20 years and think the US's biggest threat is some country on the other side of the planet who makes the stuff that we ask them to make, and not the billionaires and megacorps who control every aspect of our economic and political system which directly lead to the situation we are in now. The call is coming from inside the house, man :)

I would definitely argue the opposite, that China is the larger threat.

They want control of Taiwan and are building way more capable hardware than Russia has.

Sounds bad man.

Meanwhile, Amazon and its executives are union-busting to keep worker rights minimal, running a nation-wide law enforcement surveillance network, supporting Republican politicians and all of their anti-American policies and practices, lobbying to oppose anti-trust enforcement to keep hold of their illegal market positions and keep our economy weak, and they own one of the nation's largest newspapers specifically so they can control the narrative over their own actions. And that's all happening right here, in the US, influencing our laws and our media, right now today, not in some theoretical future.

So yeah in terms of entities that are actually doing real harm to Americans, Amazon beats China no question.

To be fair, shopping at Amazon is nearly the same as shopping at some Chinese company. They bring in Chinese products by the boatload, warehouse them here and offer 2 day shipping. That's virtually their entire retail business and value proposition. It's a slightly curated selection, easy ordering and fast shipping. You can buy all the same stuff for less at Ali Express if you don't mind waiting 3 weeks.

I don't mean to make light of what Amazon actually does. Their logistics are incredible. But, really, that's what they are. A logistics company. Your money still goes to China and you pay more so an American company can get their cut too.

>"To be fair, shopping at Amazon is nearly the same as shopping at some Chinese company."

Have you actually used AliExpress? I use both Amazon and AE, and the former definitely offers a lower-deceit, easier to use, and better customer experience. Amazon powers most of the web, whereas AE regularly has massive bugs (I was completely unable to sign in for over a month due to a UI bug last year).

That's interesting. To me as a Canadian, I think Amazon is more aligned with my best interests than China.

What makes you feel otherwise?

See other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46277647

I’m glad it was blocked. Amazon gives law enforcement and ICE access to Ring camera footage. I have no doubt they’d eventually be letting cops spy inside our homes with these vacuum cleaners.

So you’d prefer we send access to China? The comment above was pointing out that we blocked the acquisition that would have kept it in the country.

The US government is more likely to be a threat to my personal freedom than the Chinese.

The emergence of a totalitarian state compared to a liberal democracy (for all it's faults and current state due to voters making bad choices) is so much worse for everyone in the world. Us included

Please point to where the Chinese will have a direct negative impact to my life.

What exactly can the Chinese government do to hurt you in your own home in America?

Now think about what the American government can do to you.

What was the last time a Chinese person shot a US citizen?

When was the last time you called a Chinese person to respond to a crime?

Is that an option I’m not aware of?

Do chinese police even carry firearms? edit: most don’t (https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/countries...)

So, given that, I would choose 100/100 times to deal with Chinese police over the US ICE/police murder squads if I had an option

No I was pointing out the absurdity of your comment. Cops are called to respond to violent crimes in America, Chinese people aren’t (presumably the response time would be far too long) so even if they were identical people, you’d expect a lot more police shootings than ones by Chinese citizens on the streets of America.

The Chinese government may not need its law enforcement officers to carry guns (that’s great but that ship sailed here centuries ago) but they do send vans to harvest the organs of dissidents. And Google “persecution of Uyghurs”.

They’re not a benign organization just because they shoot less, they just get shot at less.

My dude I spied on the Chinese for a decade I know more about the Chinese than you’ll ever understand

Let me be clear, the Han don’t care about anybody but the Han that’s a fact. What they do to Tibetans, Uighurs and Muslims is horrible and those repressions shouldn’t exist.

However they pale and comparison into the historical horrific conditions of nonstop genocide from 1650 more or less until present day if you include the global war on terror and the modern prisoner slave market encoded into the constitution (13th amendment)

If you wanna go all the way back to the cultural revolution then absolutely fine but my argument there is going to be that’s no different than any of the culls that the United States or any other country have done. So they don’t get a pass but they aren’t worse

Ultimately all you have to do is put up the “death toll” from state action both inside the nation and outside the nation to compare numbers. I’ll let you go ahead and do that exercise.

No that the communist party has only ruled in China for less than 100 years but the same structure in America which has been completely depraved since the founders of the country were alive and actively shaping the politics of the US is coming up on 350 years ago.

I mean for Christ sake we bought the southern United States from France in order to maintain our slave plantations as the French were getting rid of all their slave holdings worldwide. And then after the Civil War which was supposed to solve that ethical burden they completely gutted the entire process of reconstruction in order to prevent the full completion of it because the population was so racist they did not want to do it. As a black person in America I will tell you the slave population in jails is higher than it ever was anywhere else.

If that’s not a disqualification on its own of any type of ethical foundations I don’t know what is.

I love Hacker News because there are people smart enough to write passably well but insane enough to get to this sort of thing within two hops of discussing a vacuum maker going bankrupt.

I won’t engage the insanity of calling anything we’re doing genocide (I guess we’re just really bad at it because the targeted populations are growing while we do it despite all our weaponry) because what’s the point? But if you think Amazon is more evil than the CCP because police shoot more Americans than the population of China, my only hope is that you learn to use logic as coherently as the language.

It is, however, about as likely as my Roomba assassinating me because the CIA ordered it to. I say this without malice and not as an insult: therapy can help. This is likely trauma response.

Haha I love this response.

Yeah HN is a weird a place I’ve been messing on a long time.

I treat these discussions like if I was taking the hardest to defend positions.

Despite whatever you might think of Louis CK he taught me the idea that you try and lose the audience early snd then win them over then you have the best joke. I think it’s the same for intellectual sparring and I love causing chaos.

It’s a good critic in my actor-critic model. Plus I have an insane amount of experience so most of my ideas are kind of nested complexities and I don’t like to translate to college level.

In the U.S. you have free trials, in china you don't. What are you even talking about.

I’ve been in court multiple times in my life including last month. I assure you there’s nothing free about them.

The US has the largest prison population.

China has plenty of problems but no country matches the depravity of the US “justice” system.

Oh and that’s just the “formal” system, go to the south and you’ll see what it is.

No county matches the depravity of the U.S justice system? Other countries (china for example) have reeducation and labor camps. The us has its problems, and we should make things better! But it's incomparable, china actively imprisons political enemies, puts Muslims in "reeducation" camps, and has an iron fist on free expression.

The U.S. never made internment camps or had rampant government enforced slavery? Cmon

Do they have them today? Wasn't my claim that they never did.

Yes

https://eji.org/news/history-racial-injustice-prison-labor/

Hard to tell if someone is ignorant, not bright, or a CCP propaganda bot these days, but anyone who thinks the Chinese government is preferable to Amazon is one (at least) of those 3.

Well, were they handed a valid warrant asking for that footage?

Maybe there's a 3rd option... like encrypt the footage in a way that it can't be accessed en-masse without passwords?

Like imagine if the US government gave a warrant to apple and said "Give us all iphone pictures from this area on this date"... they'd presumably say "We won't because we designed it so that we can't."

What’s the basis for this claim except some ideology you possess?

In the sidebar of the Amazon website (which may vary by device/locale), I get Prime, Echo, Alexa, Fire TV/Tablets, Kindle, Audible listed before all other product categories. The special treatment so explicit, I didn't think anybody would even doubt it, but rather reply "duuuh, of course Amazon.com is for selling Amazon's own stuff".

I'm a follower of Cory Doctorow's anti-enshittification ideology (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FwkaS389W-g). Amazon is well-known for giving preferential treatment to its own products, while squeezing other sellers to pay for placement (Amazon ads).

If you want something more data-driven, see "Self-Preferencing at Amazon: Evidence from Search Rankings" (DOI 10.1257/pandp.20231068), but this one is about everyday products. I'd expect Roombas to get more blatant promos like Kindle, Fire, and Ring products get. For example, if I search for "doorbell" on Amazon, the very first thing I get is a huge promo for Blink products (an Amazon company), four results from random brands nobody heard of, and then another huge promo for Ring (Amazon brand).

That's not substantiating your initial goalpost. You suggested Amazon wouldn't make Roombas better simply because they can preferentially sell their products. First, empirically, that is false given all other hardware devices Amazon makes have improved over time and not particularly gotten more expensive.

Second, preferentially selling it on one retailer does not suddenly make all the competition go away. Amazon is not a retail monopoly or anywhere close to it despite Lina Khan's bullshit paper that went through some mental gymnastics to create that myth. If anything, the synergy with the retail storefront can reduce overhead and decrease prices to the consumer.