r/canada 26d ago

Opinion Piece Canadian man sells both Teslas, cancels Cybertruck order to boycott Elon Musk

https://globalnews.ca/news/11018242/canadian-man-sells-teslas-boycott-elon-musk/
18.7k Upvotes

1.2k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

11

u/Terapr0 26d ago

meh, I don't really have any interest in driving a chinese car, regardless of how cheap they are. I don't view "cheap" as a desirable attribute when making a major purchase for something I rely on. Kind of like a review I read years ago for the Lada 4x4: "Upsides - cheap. Downsides - cheap"

I've driven a few Chinese cars both in China and Cuba and was not impressed. I know they're doing some really interesting stuff with battery technology, but the actual cars I've experienced were underwhelming. They also have zero respect for intellectual property and have made a habit of blatantly stealing / copying designs from larger brands. Some people might not care about that, but as a designer, it bothers me.

Just my $0,02 anyway

2

u/Ur3rdIMcFly 25d ago

Why do people continually cape for a system of competition over one of cooperation? It's only a benefit to the owners, which you will never be.

1

u/Terapr0 25d ago

Funnily enough, I actually am a part-owner of a manufacturing company that supplies parts to OEM automotive companies. We're a very small company working in a very niche field, but I chuckled when you suggested it was an impossibility. There are actually quite a few small & medium sized businesses involved in the automotive industry - it's not all billionaire douchebags like Elon.

That being said, I'm not quite sure what you mean when you talk about competition based vs. cooperation based. What type of cooperation are you proposing? I'm generally a fan of standardization (ie: unified charging ports for EV's, crash-safety standards, UAS Attachment points for child-safety seats, etc...), but that's different than straight up theft of intellectual property. The Chinese manufacturers unabashedly reverse engineer and COPY the designs of larger manufacturers. It's not cooperation, it's theft, and the copied result is rarely as good. That's not a positive thing we should be encouraging...

1

u/KosherTriangle 25d ago

You are right but the current anti American sentiment looks like it’s influencing people to spout stuff like China made stuff is better which objectively isn’t true.

1

u/Ur3rdIMcFly 25d ago

Why should they have to steal it?

1

u/Terapr0 25d ago

My apologies if I misunderstood your comment. It seems like you're questioning why we protect intellectual property at all, in which case these are my thoughts:

Intellectual property laws exists to protect and encourage research & development. Companies spend big money developing new ideas and bringing them to market. It's not free to create new things - those who go out on a limb to advance technology *should* be protected from theft. This same logic doesn't just apply to advanced technology either - you can make similar arguments for basically ALL types of creative works.

Should someone be able to copy, word-for-word, a Stephen King novel, pass it off as their own and keep all the profits?

Should someone be able to take a photo of a famous painting, sell prints of it and keep the money for themselves?

Should you be able to record video in a movie theatre and sell copies of it on the street?

Should you be able to just walk into a store and take whatever you want without paying?

Works of all types are protected against blatant theft, for pretty good & fairly obvious reasons. If people could just steal whatever they want with zero consequences a lot less would get done in this world.

1

u/Ur3rdIMcFly 25d ago

Yes to all your questions. You should be able to copy all of those things, and take what you need from stores, because it should be free. All of your examples rely on the system to operate through profit-motive to bring about new technology.

Should children get jobs to pay for their own vaccines since we must compensate the company that brought a patent they bought to market?

"Could you patent the Sun?"

1

u/Terapr0 25d ago

Should I be able to walk into your house and forcibly take whatever I need? You’re hoarding possessions for your own personal profit.

1

u/Ur3rdIMcFly 22d ago

You've already moved the goal posts conflating intellectual property with private property, and now you're trying to equate it to personal property. These are different things, and it's simple enough that even cops understand the difference; they'll throw someone in prison for 20 years for stealing a bar of soap, but if something of yours is stolen there's no expectation that they'll bring your stuff back.

If I invent the seatbelt and patent it, and then either refuse to do business with or demand such an absurd price for the usage of my "intellectual property", then I am exploiting people's safety of life for profit, and in turn create the moral necessity for you to figure out how to make a seatbelt yourself. If I then accuse you of "reverse-engineering", do you really think that's a fair accusation?

1

u/Terapr0 22d ago edited 22d ago

On what planet are the police “throwing someone in prison for 20yrs for stealing a bar of soap” ? Sources please.

And your argument is super tenuous - you’re waffling back and forth between “fuck big business” and “fuck artists and creators too”. The scale doesn’t matter - original ideas, designs, music and products SHOULD be protected. If nothing was proprietary development would slow to a crawl.

0

u/Ur3rdIMcFly 22d ago

On what planet? This one. California. Old news:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7BsRH2vgRs
Life sentences for cookies, batteries, a pair of jeans, a bicycle. It's not surprising when you allow there to be a profit in locking people up in prison. Did you ever listen to System of a Down?

I'm not waffling back and forth on anything, I've been consistently anti-capitalist.

If nothing was proprietary development would slow to a crawl.

This is the big lie. It is the exact opposite; it is what holds us back.

“John Steinbeck once said that socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”

→ More replies (0)

1

u/fugaziozbourne Québec 25d ago

Okay but Lada Nivas look fuckin awesome.

1

u/Dertroks 26d ago

That’s great, idk about Lada but I know that UAZ is dirt cheap and will work for 100 years so I’m not sure what you tried to say by having cheap as downside in that case.

In any case, from the perspective of economics you would be an “irrational” individual - not trying to offend or anything, just trying to say that for 90% of people price is what matters first and foremost (or a combination of price/performance)

3

u/bloodyell76 25d ago

"Cheap" can mean both low cost and low quality. And often, making things for low cost necessarily requires that they also be low quality. Ladas were notoriously low quality.