slap the Nike label on sweatshop produced sneakers.
IP and Design are not just a label.
Maybe for sneakers and other useless shit, but when it comes to tech, weapons, and planes,
design is not a one and done process but a constant adaptation to a constantly changing world.
Take a smartphone for example, billions of dollars or R&D went into designing it, people figured out what parts were needed where, their cost, would they balance this other part out, etc...
The blackpill perspective you're touching on is that once this thing is manufactured in China, they can just reverse engineer it and make their own, bypassing billions of dollars and decades of R&D. While this does happen they can only do it once.
The Chinese factory doesn't know
why those decisions were made the way they were or what will be impacted when things inevitably change. The design team in the US redoes this process for every new production batch and it's an arduous hyper complex process:
"This initial material we used is going up in price because of a civil war in The Democratic Republic of Hwadbababganda... we need a different material to put there. Well we initially chose this one because it has this amount of heat resistance relative to conduction and can be refined in this one factory where the fabs can be used for this or that. We need to make sure the new material we use also doesn't interfere with this other component which we learned from Test C-53ef34 ten years ago. oh and also the guys who work on the adjacent component are changing something because of a war in Shitbrownistan so we need to constantly communicate with them to make sure there's no interference, luckily we have a constantly open channel of communication etc. etc. etc..."
^ This is millions of research papers, databases, hyper niche infrastructure projects, prototypes, testing data, constantly open communication channels talking back and fourth and people who worked on them and remember why the decisions were made.
The design espionage, hacking, and other methods of chinese IP theft don't completely solve this problem for them either. You can't just get one piece of data you need the entire picture mentioned above. This is why the Chinese have been stealing shit for decades and still can't replicate most of the products the west has.
I do agree with your overall point that a lot of the economy is fake and gay, but you're going way too far and this is one specific point i'm tired of hearing about. The west really needs to come back to earth and start doing more concrete physical work, but the idea that whichever country gets a bunch of components shipped to them and puts screws in them holds all the cards is equally absurd and over parroted.
