I don’t think we’re contradicting each other. Sometimes the manufacturer themselves (or other Chinese entities) will be the ones creating the spec.

It also makes sense that the trash products, which compete exclusively on price, will mostly be coming from the area able to manufacture products for the lowest price. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t also able to manufacture higher quality things when requested to.

At least for Norway, this is not technically true, but it also doesn’t matter.

Unions will run surveys across their members every year, and as long as they have enough members to have bargaining power, they also have the data. So they don’t really need all wages to be public in order to negotiate.

What is public in Norway, is the total taxable income of individuals. This is meant as a measure against tax fraud, and also an annual source of entertainment as you look up local and national rankings of who paid the most taxes, check that you’re still making more than your middle school bully, and so forth. But total taxable income can contain more than wages, so that is not really the number you’re referring to, and as mentioned the union has better data anyway.

From what I’ve heard, Norwegian unions are actively against a national minimum wage, because they believe that would act as a low anchor harming their negotiations.

Although there is no national minimum wage in Norway, certain industries or specific groups do have a specific minimum wage. For example, there is a legally mandated minimum wage for minors, to avoid them being exploited in summer jobs.

In other cases, unions have negotiated fixed levels for their focus areas (e.g. engineers working government jobs), and everyone working those jobs, whether they’re members of the union or not, will get paid those levels. Sometimes everyone in the group gets a raise simultaneously as a result of annual union negotiations.

It doesn’t matter where it’s produced, what matters is who designed it and for what market. Things tailored for the mass US market are usually designed to minimize the cost of manufacturing above all else. Things tailored for Europe are a little earlier in the enshittification process.

There are tons of high quality products manufactured in China, the only difference is that the specs for those asked for high quality, while the things you associate with Chinese manufacturing are when they were asked to make trash.

American business leadership tends to think level of income is correlated with effort, and as a consequence assume anyone below them on the corporate ladder is a lazy bum. Lazy bums obviously need to be in the office so they can be supervised. Evidence to the contrary is just exceptions to the rule, and cannot dictate policy.

See also: Prosperity Gospel, Calvinism.

Probably halloween costumes.

Biden already set precedent by pardoning his entire administration to prevent malicious prosecutions from this one. Motivation may have been different, but that doesn’t really change that he just promised to do the same thing Biden did.