a box of worthless amazing crap

October 14, 2016 11:53 AM

What $50 buys you at Huaqiangbei, the world’s most fascinating electronics market.
posted by DynamiteToast (60 comments total)

I don't see the point of this. "Worthless crap" has a real cost (maybe even more so than expensive crap): you have to exploit the earth and humans to make, sell, and dispose of it.
posted by splitpeasoup at 12:04 PM on October 14, 2016 [6 favorites]

Holy crap, the GSM wrist-watch phone and the iPhone-controlable camera drone between them came to less than half the $50?

OK, there's hope for my shiny! habit even after Hard Brexit breaks my currency and I have to go squat in a cardboard box and eat my porridge oats raw.
posted by cstross at 12:10 PM on October 14, 2016 [23 favorites]

Those iphone repair templates actually prevent waste.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 12:17 PM on October 14, 2016 [11 favorites]

Comment #1 answered by comment #2 - people like shiny!, which is generally produced in China, but official, major brand products have more QA/QC, so you get something more than a 6 month guarantee and a 1 in 3 chance of the product turning on, for a significantly higher sticker price.

This is a peak behind the curtain at what tech really costs, when you're close to the source. It's an excuse for these folks to poke around HQB (and part promotion for their product), and a chance for tech geeks to travel vicariously through someone who knows what they're doing (mostly) in that market.

And it also shows off what is being produced by creative, resourceful folks who aren't bound by tech specs:

A cable that has a regular USB connector on one end and a reversible connector on the other end that fits inside a MicroUSB port and also fits inside a lightning port.

It violates the MicroUSB spec. It violates the Lightning spec. It’s wrong. Yet, somehow, it’s also incredibly right. It should not work. Yet, somehow, it does. When we showed one to a friend who works for Apple, it pretty much reduced him to distraught gibbering.

Yes, it's a gross display of exploitation of the people and resources, but buying a few boxes of worthless amazing tech isn't the culprit. That's the international industries that demand this, as well as the mirror markets that provide the knock-off alternatives for pennies on the dollar.

Those iphone repair templates actually prevent waste.

And then there's that, making "disposable technology" a little less disposable.
posted by filthy light thief at 12:19 PM on October 14, 2016 [19 favorites]

This is like dystopian BestBuy. The memory card and chimera cable are both amazing and horrifying. I hope you like watching things explode. Oh, an uncertified battery charging device? Yeah, sure, I'll take two.
posted by GuyZero at 12:24 PM on October 14, 2016 [6 favorites]

you have to exploit the earth and humans to make, sell, and dispose of it.

Maybe. But just maybe there's so much slack in the world economy that things should actually be incredibly cheap and they're only expensive for reasons that have nothing to do with chunks of silicon. Maybe when you pay $900 for a new iPhone you're actually paying for support and all those Apple store in every US mall and Jony Ive's exquisite taste and not really anything for the phone itself. Maybe when you buy a battery charger 90% of the cost is the promise it won't explode and the charger itself costs nearly nothing.
posted by GuyZero at 12:27 PM on October 14, 2016 [16 favorites]

It violates the MicroUSB spec. It violates the Lightning spec. It’s wrong. Yet, somehow, it’s also incredibly right. It should not work. Yet, somehow, it does. When we showed one to a friend who works for Apple, it pretty much reduced him to distraught gibbering.

It reduced me to distraught gibbering too. I'd be afraid to plug that into anything I valued.
posted by SansPoint at 12:27 PM on October 14, 2016 [2 favorites]

Those iphone repair templates actually prevent waste.

I'm amazed that there are iphone failure modes where replacing a single chip solves the problem.
posted by GuyZero at 12:28 PM on October 14, 2016 [1 favorite]

I have to go squat in a cardboard box

As an American who has consumed British media and news and, as such, vocabulary, I bet this reads quite a bit differently for those who haven't.
posted by RolandOfEld at 12:40 PM on October 14, 2016 [6 favorites]

Come for the terrifying cables, stay for the tape gun rockstar video.

The keyboard mentioned in the post is the end result of the project from this Mefi post on keyboards from 2013.
(As mentioned in that previous post, I know Jesse. I also know Kaia. They're both awesome.)
posted by zamboni at 12:42 PM on October 14, 2016 [8 favorites]

I've met Jesse, first saw his keyboard when it was a 3D printed prototype. Can confirm: is awesome. I also use his bug tracker, RT.
posted by zippy at 12:49 PM on October 14, 2016 [3 favorites]

I hope you like watching things explode. Oh, an uncertified battery charging device?

Can you provide ANY evidence that an uncertified cable is EVER a problem (he who quotes the FUD needs to back it up!)? When I google all I find is Samsung fans trying to deflect blame. While I have a vivid imagination about these things, I have a hard time seeing the logic here.

And assuming I'm making an ass of myself--that vivid imagination knows no bounds--I'll assert that any such failure is in fact shear incompetence in the design of the charging circuit. Even certified cables will fail over time, and a failing cable should NEVER be allowed to cause catastrophic battery failure.

My rule of thumb is, if it plugs in the AC line, you buy it with proper safety certification. If it is low voltage DC stuff, have at it.

I'm amazed that there are iphone failure modes where replacing a single chip solves the problem.

While there certainly would be failed chips sometimes, the more common failure mode is bad solder joints. Reflowing is an option, but for a better repair you'd reball--take the chip off, clean up the pads, apply new solder, etc.

As somebody who actually solders though, I just can't imagine reballing by hand. I mean, I know they do it, but holy crap that's some delicate work for, even in Toronto, $20 or $30.
posted by Chuckles at 12:52 PM on October 14, 2016 [6 favorites]

I'm amazed that there are iphone failure modes where replacing a single chip solves the problem.

There are some, like what some folks call Touch Disease. (OK, that's technically up to two ICs, but still…)

For microsoldering adventures, see Louis Rossman's youtube channel.
posted by zamboni at 12:55 PM on October 14, 2016 [4 favorites]

To be fair, the waste caused by these gift boxes is probably on par with taking a 60 minute joy ride on a beautiful afternoon. I think its also good that they're raising awareness of this side of the electronics economy. I don't think they're advocating for this to be a massive widespread thing.

One of my favorite websites these days is dhgate, where you can buy a lot of this stuff for a cost between amazon and buying it in person in China. I find it fascinating, and it makes me want to start a flea market shop.
posted by lownote at 12:56 PM on October 14, 2016 [6 favorites]

I also use his bug tracker, RT.

He made RT?! Oh, RT is pretty great!! My esteem for him just went up. :7)
posted by wenestvedt at 12:56 PM on October 14, 2016 [1 favorite]

Can you provide ANY evidence that an uncertified cable is EVER a problem (he who quotes the FUD needs to back it up!)? --zamboni

USB A-to-C cable completely violates the USB spec. Seriously damaged my laptop.

(It is an Amazon review, but it is by a Google employee who tests cables, among other things).
posted by eye of newt at 1:12 PM on October 14, 2016 [9 favorites]

Can you provide ANY evidence that an uncertified cable is EVER a problem (he who quotes the FUD needs to back it up!)? When I google all I find is Samsung fans trying to deflect blame. While I have a vivid imagination about these things, I have a hard time seeing the logic here.

I was thinking more of the DIY Qi adapters which seem sketchy to me. The cables aren't that dangerous for the most part, they're more likely to just break and not work at all.
posted by GuyZero at 1:31 PM on October 14, 2016

Wow, Louis Rossman is fantastic!!

Thanks eye of newt... Is that the point I'm missing here? That the lightning to micro-USB trick the cable maker is using necessitates shorting pins that won't tolerate whatever they end up being connected to? That this is a completely ill designed cable which instantly breaks the devices? Still isn't so much about danger though, as about 'this thing will break your device when you plug it in'.

Ya ya, possible knock on danger three times removed because safety circuitry got damaged. But then, shouldn't the spec be designed to keep people safe even if a kid jams a screwdriver in the port?
posted by Chuckles at 1:38 PM on October 14, 2016

Because solder is pretty resilient and I would guess a bad solder job would get caught in factory QA? Most people's iphone problems seem to be cracked screens or dropping them into water, neither of which are resolved by replacing a chip. But as someone pointed out upthread apparently there's a bunch of bad touch controllers out there so shows what I know.
posted by GuyZero at 1:58 PM on October 14, 2016

Can you provide ANY evidence that an uncertified cable is EVER a problem (he who quotes the FUD needs to back it up!)? --zamboni

That wasn't me.
posted by zamboni at 2:00 PM on October 14, 2016 [1 favorite]

What $50 buys you at Huaqiangbei

I'm really struggling to make this work, you guys, but the best I've been able to come up with is, "¥336.48, same as in town".
posted by The Tensor at 2:07 PM on October 14, 2016 [22 favorites]

Because solder is pretty resilient and I would guess a bad solder job would get caught in factory QA?

Solder may be good at the factory, as far as it can be tested (all connections go), but heat cycles, vibration, flexing ... even with good QA you may not have the time or the number of testers to cover what millions of phones in the real world will experience.
posted by zippy at 2:08 PM on October 14, 2016 [1 favorite]

That wasn't me.
posted by zamboni

Oh sure, try to smooth things over.
posted by zippy at 2:10 PM on October 14, 2016 [39 favorites]

I think you got it Tensor.
posted by DynamiteToast at 2:10 PM on October 14, 2016

The USB/lightning chimera cable probably won't send mains voltage through your heart, but it's more likely than not going to short out important bits of your phone. That will kill your phone, and in the absolute worst case could cause a lithium battery fire, causing the airplane you are on to catch fire and crash into an orphanage, killing hundreds.

In conclusion don't buy that cable, it kills babies!!!!!!
posted by monotreme at 2:10 PM on October 14, 2016 [7 favorites]

Can you provide ANY evidence that an uncertified cable is EVER a problem

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/02/google-engineer-finds-usb-type-c-cable-thats-so-bad-it-fried-his-chromebook-pixel/
posted by pharm at 2:11 PM on October 14, 2016 [1 favorite]

> but heat cycles, vibration, flexing

Yeah, my understanding is that iPhone touch disease is directly related to the amount of flex in recent iPhone frames. My current and previous iPhones are both visibly bent across the diagonal face of the phone. Some phones seem to do ok with that stress for a while, but many of them start to have problems, presumably because the microsoldering gives out in various places.
posted by drklahn at 2:17 PM on October 14, 2016 [1 favorite]

Cool keyboard. Designed to be hackable - which is quite telling.

Hacking used to mean exploiting a device/system/etc to make it do something it wasn't designed to do. Now it means something VERY different.

No surprise, and perhaps not even lamentable. Certainly amusing what dollars do to language.

(Also, I'd love to see some stats for the probability of both the words "gorgeous" and "hackable" appearing in this kind of copy. I get the vibe it'd be high.)
posted by Outside Context Problem at 2:21 PM on October 14, 2016

A couple of these can be brushed off as user error or unscrupulous seller. There are batteries that have the "don't blow up when charging" smarts built into the battery, there's no need for a charger with smarts. I think the SD cards were created for embedded monitoring type applications where having the last bits of data was preferable to running out of recording space. Of course selling these things as something they're not is shady, but the tech itself is perfectly cromulent.
posted by zengargoyle at 2:26 PM on October 14, 2016

I think the SD cards were created for embedded monitoring type applications where having the last bits of data was preferable to running out of recording space.

No, they are very much created to defraud buyers. Their labelled capacity is much higher than their actual capacity.
posted by GuyZero at 2:35 PM on October 14, 2016 [14 favorites]

That was a fascinating read, thanks for sharing!
posted by bologna on wry at 2:37 PM on October 14, 2016 [2 favorites]

This read like a narrated version of exploring all the oddities that appear on AliExpress. It's a great time sink to poke around on there and see what weird thing someone put android 2 on.
posted by msbutah at 2:38 PM on October 14, 2016 [3 favorites]

"(We couldn’t find the fake SD card, flippable cable or stickers on Amazon.) "

Heh, somebody doesn't read amazon customer reviews of surprisingly cheap sd cards.
posted by I-baLL at 2:41 PM on October 14, 2016 [3 favorites]

I used to live about a 5 minute walk from here and used to go here for all my electronics needs, and just to kind of admire the spectacle. They were also a great place to buy pirated DVDs. I bought a faulty USB drive there once (it had as much storage as was advertised, but you'd lose all the data you had on it whenever it was unplugged), but also bought quite a lot of completely adequate stuff for much cheaper than I could get anywhere else.
posted by skewed at 2:43 PM on October 14, 2016 [1 favorite]

A cable that has a regular USB connector on one end and a reversible connector on the other end that fits inside a MicroUSB port and also fits inside a lightning port.

It violates the MicroUSB spec. It violates the Lightning spec. It’s wrong. Yet, somehow, it’s also incredibly right. It should not work. Yet, somehow, it does. When we showed one to a friend who works for Apple, it pretty much reduced him to distraught gibbering.

Apparently never took the time to look at all the iPhon / iPone 6's (and probably 7's now) there. Most have what looks like a Lightning socket that's actually just USB.

Fake cords for fake phones.
posted by Pinback at 2:53 PM on October 14, 2016 [1 favorite]

Fake cords for fake phones.

I assume that all Shenzhen electronics malls play Radiohead in the background all the time.
posted by GuyZero at 2:56 PM on October 14, 2016 [1 favorite]

what's endlessly interesting to me is that most of those circuit boards are soldered by hand.
posted by ennui.bz at 3:13 PM on October 14, 2016

Hacking used to mean exploiting a device/system/etc to make it do something it wasn't designed to do. Now it means something VERY different.

Different how? Is it that it's not hacking if you've been given permission?

We believe, quite strongly, that you own the things you buy from us. You are 100% welcome to open your keyboard up, flash its firmware, reflash its bootloader, solder weird connectors onto the circuit boards or flash our firmware onto something else. (Do note that we're not going to be able to help you out a lot after you do some of those things.) To make all of this as easy as possible for you, your Model 01 will ship with a screwdriver, firmware & bootloader source code, schematics, and all the CAD you need to design your own enclosure.

posted by zamboni at 3:18 PM on October 14, 2016 [2 favorites]

I would consider wearing that watch.

I'm pretty sure it would explode long before giving me wrist cancer, which not everything can say.
posted by delfin at 3:19 PM on October 14, 2016 [3 favorites]

GuyZero, the labeled capacity is the shady part. The SD card that magically is never full but only actually holds the last X writes is cromulent. More useful back when SD capacity was smaller. Having that magic on the card removes the necessity for the device to know about and manage available space. The device can just collect data and write data and have no other smarts needed. Your trail camera has the last month of pictures instead of the first month of pictures no matter when you manage to recover it.

It's the same with the WiFi SD cards. Insert card, *presto*, same hardware now magically stores data over WiFi without any hardware change.
posted by zengargoyle at 3:35 PM on October 14, 2016 [1 favorite]

Hacking used to mean exploiting a device/system/etc to make it do something it wasn't designed to do.

Hacking has meant "applying technical ingenuity" for as long as it's been a word, pretty much. This might or might not involve using a piece of hardware off-spec, but that's not an essential part of the meaning at all.

While the word in this sense did originate with hardware hacking, in the MIT Model Railroad club in the 1960s, it was pretty quickly appropriated to apply to software development, since those model railroad kids were also into programming. And among programmers, "hacking" really just means "manipulating software," usually by writing code. (The more-common infosec meaning of the word, which is also valid, is derived from this sense.) If your environment gives you access to existing code, working on that code is not and has never been not hacking. It's just a more hacker-friendly environment.

In this case, we have a piece of hardware that exposes its hardware internals (by allowing you to open it up with a normal screwdriver) and also exposes its software internals (by providing source code.) The designers have attempted to create a hacker-friendly product, and that's not a contradiction in terms.

Open-source programmers in particular like to call themselves hackers. And what is open-source software but software designed to be hackable?
posted by a mirror and an encyclopedia at 3:36 PM on October 14, 2016 [4 favorites]

Now, if you want to complain about appropriation of the word "hack" for profit, or commercialization of "hacker culture" or something like that, that's a reasonable conversation to have.

But I don't agree that the word itself is being misapplied here.
posted by a mirror and an encyclopedia at 3:38 PM on October 14, 2016 [2 favorites]

OMG that place looks amazing.
posted by Annika Cicada at 3:55 PM on October 14, 2016 [3 favorites]

The SD card that magically is never full but only actually holds the last X writes is cromulent.

I don't think so.

a - it's not standard, which is really the key. Like, could someone use it? Maybe. But it is absolutely not part of the SD storage standard.

b - it's super duper dangerous. Most systems that want a rolling buffer implement it in the app layer and not in the storage device for a good reason. There absolutely no way to tell which bytes are getting clobbered here.

c - they're not labelled in any way as anything other than a standard SD card, even if their capacity was correct.

I think the comparison to wifi sd cards that sync photos is not a good once since things like eyefi cards devolve into regular SD cards if you won't use the wifi parts. This devolves into chaos and suffering if you swap it with a regular SD card.
posted by GuyZero at 3:59 PM on October 14, 2016 [1 favorite]

My rule of thumb is, if it plugs in the AC line, you buy it with proper safety certification. If it is low voltage DC stuff, have at it.

Ehhhhhhh

I agreed with this for years, but i've seen more than a handful of shit-spec $1 30pin and lightning cables MELT at the connector because they used the wrong gauge of wire that couldn't even handle 1a much less 2.1a charging.

It's a real thing. I have photos of a browned up USB jack and a melted cable right before the not-usb end to prove it.

I have anecdotal or customer evidence of a lot of this, from back when i used to repair a shitload of phones all the time.

The biggest issue i see is knockoff companies trying to clone apples "thin" cables that actually have proper gauge wires with VERY thin insulation, using normal gauge insulation and tiny gauge wiring that could maybe handle 500mAh.

It's a mess. My solution is to buy "certified" MFI cables on slickdeals for dirt cheap, like amazon basics. They at least validate that, and they aren't $20-for-a-50-cent-cable highway robbery. More like ~$6

Low voltage DC cables CAN catastrophically fail though. I had one kill a USB port on a $1300 brand new laptop...
posted by emptythought at 4:52 PM on October 14, 2016 [6 favorites]

There absolutely no way to tell which bytes are getting clobbered here.

Exactamently. Maybe the oldest stuff will get deleted, but maybe not.
posted by Kevin Street at 5:13 PM on October 14, 2016

I have the non-GSM version of that watch (you have to pair it with a phone) from eBay, $9 shipped. Essentially Shenzhen by subsidized mail.

It has a surprising number of features that actually work, although it was a bit of an easter egg hunt to find the right Android app for some of them. The main reason I'm not wearing it now is that it doesn't have an accelerometer, so the only way to wake it up to check the time is to press a button. Since actually glancing at my watch to check the time is the main thing I wear a watch for, It's a cheap curiosity I got my money's worth exploring.

As for the bogus SD card, that's actually a very useful thing as long as you know what it is. The rolling buffer functionality is something you can't always do with the app if the app is something's firmware. It's the perfect thing for a security camera that takes a snap every ten seconds to just leave it in place forever and pull it when you need to figure out who smashed your window.

But yeah, while the vendor's candor was refreshing, it's really should be indelibly labeled. The vendor doesn't know who the OP is going to resell it to, after all.
posted by Bringer Tom at 6:01 PM on October 14, 2016

I don't see the point of this. "Worthless crap" has a real cost (maybe even more so than expensive crap): you have to exploit the earth and humans to make, sell, and dispose of it.

Came to thread hoping for paradigmatic buzzkill mefi comment: left, satisfied.
posted by Sebmojo at 6:08 PM on October 14, 2016 [19 favorites]

It's the perfect thing for a security camera that takes a snap every ten seconds to just leave it in place forever and pull it when you need to figure out who smashed your window.

For that to work reliably you'd need a chip that understands FAT32 to a large enough degree that it can reliably overwrite only blocks filled with old files and leave new files alone. I don't think any of the fake chips have that level of sophistication.
posted by ymgve at 6:09 PM on October 14, 2016 [1 favorite]

ymgve, all SD cards understand FAT32 that well. They have to in order to do wear leveling on a format that continuously rewrites the FAT so often. The SD controller is itself a ~100 MHz 32-bit computer with a fair supply of RAM for sector buffering, and it is the firmware for this uC that they have hacked to create the rolling function. There is also no reason to doubt that they are burning data in FIFO fashion, since the card may not know the real time and date but it certainly does know which files it wrote in which order.

(In addition to having seen an article a couple of years ago on hacking SD card control uC's, I have written my own FAT and FAT32 drivers for SD card interfaces on a couple of microcontrollers, so this is not a mystery to me.)
posted by Bringer Tom at 6:37 PM on October 14, 2016 [6 favorites]

Actually, thinking about it, the biggest opportunity for a SD card clusterfrack would be when using it with an actual computer running a real operating system. In that case the OS is likely to be keeping its own copies of the directories and FAT and might not be continually re-reading them from the card, so it might not be aware that files have disappeared from a "full" card creating more room. Small computers like cameras and microcontrollers are less likely to have this problem, because they don't have a lot of RAM for such buffers and will just ask the card before every operation.
posted by Bringer Tom at 6:44 PM on October 14, 2016 [1 favorite]

If it is low voltage DC stuff, have at it.

Like emptythought, yeah, maybe not. I somehow recycled an old off-brand molex to SATA power adaptor to a DVD drive in a desktop build. One day, it just went and caught fire. The drive wasn't even in operation.

I freaked out and unplugged at the powerstrip before taking a picture. Fire went out. Couldn't see any visible damage. Shut down the PSU, replugged, turned on the PSU, powered on

FOOOSH

Yanked the power cord again and took a closer look. Convertor cable melted a chunk out of the DVD drive.

The rest of the desktop was just fine.
posted by porpoise at 7:27 PM on October 14, 2016 [2 favorites]

The chimera Micro USB/Lightning cables aren't hard to find on Ebay. Going price seems to range from $4 to $8 including shipping to North America. Cheaper at auctions, if you feel that strongly about it. Certainly more expensive than in a Chinese market, but think of the airfare you save.

I'm not letting one of them near anything I own but I have to confess it's a fascinating sort of crazy.
posted by ardgedee at 4:48 AM on October 15, 2016 [1 favorite]

I've had probably a dozen official Apple cables that have stripped insulation, including MacBook power adapters. This never happened with any generic USB cable. I think the certification aspect is overrated in some cases. (Also, there was a class action for this very issue that appears to have not corrected the behavior)
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 7:05 AM on October 15, 2016 [2 favorites]

I bought one of these and feel like I got my $50 worth, though I'm still trying to find the least sketchy android app to use with the watch. The instruction sheet gives a URL to a .apk that I haven't been brave enough to install on my phone, the QR code that the watch can display links to a different one on the play store that sorta works, and there are various others scattered around.

The wireless charger has not set my phone on fire yet.

I am _terrible_ at flying a tiny quadcopter.

disclaimer: I know Jesse and Kaia and think they're pretty awesome
posted by teferi at 8:33 AM on October 15, 2016 [5 favorites]

Some weirdness here about 'watches that will explode', 'dystopian best buy', etc. As if the vast majority of technology we owned didn't involve Chinese manufacturing.

I was at Huaqiangbei a few months ago and was awed by the intensity and energy of sheer manufacturing. Everything from low-end to high-end, massive spools of ICs, LEDs, etc. Incredible advances in manufacturing and technology being laden. It was also nauseating to see the heart of consumer electronics, too - I've seen way too many iPhone cases and cables than I need to see in a lifetime. What was immediately clear was that this was a place in which the present and future was being made, manufactured, refined.

The day after I came back home to NYC I walked down the street and saw a street vendor selling the exact same iPhone cases. I walked into a store and it was full of objects that were, for the most part, made in China. For a good month after I got back I couldn't shake the feeling that everything around me seemed to be made in a single place, shipped thousands of miles by land/air/sea.

And then I thought - what a funny place this country (the US) can be, full of concern about bacteria and antibiotics and health and natural food and artisanal products and home-brewed beer, and then in order to achieve these things import all these products from another place, and then turn around and act condescendingly towards that place because they make 'cheap things', as if somehow their expensive technology or objects is any way distant from those things.

Like a diner going into the kitchen of the world and being surprised that there's garbage in the garbage can, dishes in the sink, tubs of oil in the stockroom. This kitchen makes foie gras and junk food alike, because its diners have an appetite for foie gras and junk food alike. In this kitchen food comes alive, and the chefs are incredibly talented, and the sheer size and scale and complexity of the operation is staggering to behold, and the most interesting things come out of the kitchen sometimes, even sometimes it's a whole bunch of pop-tarts and sugar junk.

One would hope that our diner doesn't go in and recoil in horror, say things like, "everything's so noisy", "this junk food looks disgusting", "there's so much garbage being produced". One would hope that the diner doesn't then say, "ugh, forget this, I'm going to go back to the dining area, sit at my table, and eat my foie gras, which is much better than anything made back there..."
posted by suedehead at 10:28 AM on October 15, 2016 [13 favorites]

Here's some photos of your kitchen and let's hope not many more of the live-in workers kill themselves. /hamburger
posted by yoHighness at 3:19 PM on October 15, 2016

See, that's the point. Those photos are of your kitchen, too.
posted by suedehead at 3:41 PM on October 15, 2016 [6 favorites]

Damn, my bad. I mistook your kitchen metaphor for a romanticising one and then my brain glitched out on your last sentence. I agree, I hope more people can see how it is made and then not look away.
posted by yoHighness at 4:28 AM on October 16, 2016 [1 favorite]

I was at Huaqiangbei a few months ago and was awed by the intensity and energy of sheer manufacturing.

A lot of stuff on Kickstarter ends up being made by manufacturing partners in China who have specialised and specialised. There was a good talk at XOXO about the NeoLucida project, and how "made in China" isn't typically How It's Made automated-production-line manufacturing: it's custom machining and moulding and assembly by hand, at a precision and skill that has grown over time, just as the cluster of shoemakers in Northampton turned it into a centre of excellence. The "cheapness" of certain goods imported from China (whether it's electronics or the seasonal novelty market in Yiwu) is ultimately down to the cheapness of whoever's putting in the order from abroad.
posted by holgate at 1:26 PM on October 20, 2016 [2 favorites]