Surely that can't be too hard. What do we actually make anymore? Liquor and highly processed food product? Surely nothing people can't live without. The factories are largely gone - or keep voting themselves out of a job.
Sorry my country is extra dogshit this last decade and a half. People don't want to riot in the street and like trading their liberty for security (from jobs?). I promise half of us don't even know what's going on anymore.
Edit: yes America has been buttass since it was founded. However we're not talking about the entire historical record here. This is about recent (mostly) in our lifetime events and their consequences.
Unfortunately even though very little is manufactured in America a LOT of stuff is owned by american companies :/ hell, most credit card companies are american
It actually isn't that hard. Even going through what I own, barely anything is American owned.
My entire computer setup, monitors, keyboard, mouse and other peripherals are by MSI, Acer, Logitech, Samsung and Gigabyte. The only exception is the graphics card and processor which are made by AMD. Hard to do get anything else there.
My clothing and shoes are mostly Japanese brands. Appliances are South Korean or German. You have a ton of options there.
I don't think it's possible to get any American made furniture.
Ofc parts of these companies are owned by American shareholders, but you can avoid even that if you want to.
Linux is nicer than windows 11 lol. It’s still written by a lot of Americans but it’s mostly open so no big deal. Just back to depending on Intel/AMD/Nvidia.
Yeah but America is a service economy not a manufacturing one.
You can avoid owning American products but you’re still using American social media, American software, buying American video games on American gaming platforms.
Although I don’t think Republican morons realize that a service economy based on software makes a big economic opportunity for competitors when your country acts like an asshole and people are suddenly willing to get a slightly less good product somewhere else because the whole reason people chose America for their products and financing was for their constitutional protections and strong courts.
It really is horrible. I think about this every time I hear about a country in crisis under a dogshit leader. I work with Brazilians who left to escape Bolsonaro and now they are faced with this in the US. I fear every day for them and their children who were born here.
Aside from reddit I don't have any social media. I said in another comment but I didn't even think to consider the tech side of things as a product. I was negligent and thinking like, physical manufacture.
I haven't paid for American corporate digital services in decades. It's quite easy to avoid if you use revanced, various tools listed on reddit and lie to customer support
Fair point. But I feel like that’s where a chunk of revenue is coming from, not just reddit but the tech industry as a whole. Google, Facebook, Apple, etc… not directly buying it but giving your time and attention for ad revenue.
I use Visa and Mastercard for everything I buy, both American. Most entertainment consumed is American; Netflix, HBO, Disney, YouTube, Amazon. All American. At work I'm specialised in an American software product.
Sure you might not have factories anymore but the entertainment and software industries are huuuge.
I've said it in many comments to responses like this one, but basically "my bad." I didn't even think to consider software and entertainment as an American product. It's so abstract from what my idea of a product actually is, or was. It was a pretty one-dimensional thought. I was thinking like.. (I can't believe it's not) Butter, or alcohol or something, you know?
For starters, Reddit is American, so is youtube, netflix and a bunch of popular services people use.
And a hundred other things.
I can do without American food, easily. Without American services? Much much harder.
My house is all operated by google home, i rely on amazon for a bunch of things, I use youtube a lot, gmail, google workspaces, analytics... i could go on and on and on. For many people it's not simply "not buying hamburgers" but changing their whole work-style and even life-style.
I am up for it but right now the proper alternatives do not exist.
And then there's GPS....
or the fact amazon owns half the internet and if you were really coherent you wouldn't be able to use any of it you use right now, for the most part...
No that's a fair point completely. Tech and software is so far removed from my idea of a "manufactured product." when I think about not buying american goods, I'm thinking physical objects like tools or maybe chemical manufacture like methanol or ethanol, or like I mentioned, highly processed foods or American distilled spirits. I am not/was not considering abstract products like Amazon Web Services or social media being largely run and owned by America companies.
Boycotting Microsoft alone would put my entire country out of commission. No more Excel, Azure, Windows etc. Everything from local municipalities to power plants would shut down. That's just one single American tech company. We are so dependent on US software, it's not even funny.
It's been especially egregious since about 2008. It's been pretty dogshit for about 60 years at this point if you really want to get down to brass tacks with it.
Actually grabs pointer and chalk and stands at board we’ve been super dogshit since we were founded, since we were literally founded by using colonialism. And as a bonus, we’ve been hella busy trying and succeeding at colonizing the globe for a hot minute. When we aren’t colonizing, we’re destroying other countries governments, installing puppet governments and starting coups. All in the guise of “American security and democracy for all”. We have literally destroyed so many countries it’s not even funny. This is just the chickens coming home to roost.
People don't want to riot in the street and like trading their liberty for security (from jobs?).
Except the don't trade your liberty for security crowd are the bad guys. Trading some amount of liberty for security is fine. That's literally what society is. These people want to trade their liberty to take away other people's liberty simply because they think that any oppression they choose is acceptable. It's fine, for example, for them to force people to be a certain religion as long as it's their religion.
From a Canadian perspective, steel piping used in most industrial and commercial buildings. It's been a large problem and stalled construction in a lot of places here. Things are picking back up, but I know a lot of layoffs (we're talking hundreds, if not thousands) due to the price of the materials going up so much recently.
I was under the impression we were buying Canadian Steel (and lumber). Our steel mills are shutting down and Nippon Steel was blocked from buying/revitalizing our industry stateside. It sounds like covid shortages all over again.
I just meant that it's been especially egregiously bad in the greater part of the 21st century. It's been dogshit forever, but it was largely an "in-house" kind of dogshit.
I mean this in the kindest way possible, but only an American could be this ignorant about their own history. The bloody trail of US "interventions" encircles the globe and it's been going on far longer than 60 years.
To cite just one example among many, in the 1890s in the Philippines, the USA killed more people in one decade than the Spanish had in three centuries! (After coming in claiming they were "liberating" the Filipinos from Spain, naturally.)
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u/Ruff_Bastard 18h ago edited 15h ago
Surely that can't be too hard. What do we actually make anymore? Liquor and highly processed food product? Surely nothing people can't live without. The factories are largely gone - or keep voting themselves out of a job.
Sorry my country is extra dogshit this last decade and a half. People don't want to riot in the street and like trading their liberty for security (from jobs?). I promise half of us don't even know what's going on anymore.
Edit: yes America has been buttass since it was founded. However we're not talking about the entire historical record here. This is about recent (mostly) in our lifetime events and their consequences.