Of course it would be.
I’ve just gone through an exercise to buy 10k card boxes (flat packed) and got a nice quote from Turkey. A very pleasant lady with excellent English was emailing us there. In the end the shipping was too much (a lightweight but bulky product) but one can see the possibilities. Turkey is practically just up the road; it’s a couple of days by truck to the UK.
Peter wrote:
pick potatoes
Potatoes are easy to harvest, it is the soft fruit that are a challenge. Worry not, that too will be automated, the question is if picking raspberries or flying cargo will be first…
After the Brits stole^W bought out all of our indigenous farm support resources, we in turn started importing from further east (mainly Ukraine), but with the borders closed I’m not too sure how it will all play out. With some bad luck the drought will sort it out, as there will be nothing to pick nor harvest, viruses be damned… ;-)
The only way to kill the Chinese as well as to assure that nation states can be truely independent in times of crisis is to go back to the well proven doctrine that imports and exports need to be regulated to protect national interests and national capability to supply the home market in such situations as we have now.
In other words: Anything which a nation state can produce may only be imported taxed to equalize the price difference. Ban producing abroad completely. Apple and so on should produce where they are based, not in China, at least for the home market. Same for foodstuffs and other things. Apart from eradicating unemployment it would also stop slave labour in those countries.
Apart, travel from China should be put under quarantine, always and for ever. Nobody should be able to travel from an infested area, not only from China to one which is not infested without quarantine. Even better, not to travel at all.
Or, if one really means business, simply seize all companies and assets China has outside itś own border. That should pay for the damage, at least partly.
Unfortunately, many countries right now make the severe mistake of reopening their lockdowns way too early, paving the plan for the 2nd wave. Well, they might as well start digging mass graves for a couple of million people. And maybe then people will stop complaining that the beds in the ICUs were not overwhelmed. This time, it will be far worse than the first time. And it will start within 2 weeks of a premature lockdown release. So instead of getting back to normal in June, I fully expect that by then most countries will be either locked down again, properly this time maybe, or society has totally collapsed under millions of people infested and nobody left to take care of them.
Mooney_Driver wrote:
So instead of getting back to normal in June, I fully expect that by then most countries will be either locked down again, properly this time maybe, or society has totally collapsed under millions of people infested and nobody left to take care of them.
Things will be OK 
My biggest grief right now is I cannot go to Sweden to get snus. By principle I have always bought my snus in Sweden. No I need to get it in here in Norway at twice the price, and not the correct kind. Very very irritating.
Mooney_Driver wrote:
Anything which a nation state can produce may only be imported taxed to equalize the price difference.
I strongly suggest you take economics 101, and look up comparative costs vs Mercantilism.
And perhaps reflect on the cost to, say, produce rare earth metals in Switzerland, and how much it would cost to pay swiss watchmakers to assemble iPhones. Also, scale economies in microchip manufacturing would be an interesting area of study. Good luck with your 10k Swiss Frank iPhone, although I would guess an operating system developed by CERN would not be that bad.
Come now, let us not talk of killing the Chinese – I know that is probably not how you meant it literally. I agree that it is a country that often behaves badly and I hope that the pandemic forces some changes.
If it were left to run its course I agree that the current pandemic would be devastating, but I don’t think it would be apocalyptic.
Cobalt wrote:
I would guess an operating system developed by CERN would not be that bad.
Probably bug free
@Mooney_Driver, has it occurred to you, that iPhones (to name but one product) are not only used in the US? What you are advocating would, if you cared to think it through, iPhones for the Swiss market to be produced in Switzerland, for the UK market in the UK (perhaps even split between England, Wales and Scotland….) and so on. May I further suggest you contact any of the big Swiss pharma companies and banks to see if they were happy to produce for or service the Swiss market only? You might find, they’d laugh you out the door.
In any case, wanting to kill ‘the Chinese’ isn’t helpful. The problem are not ‘the Chinese’, but their communist, criminal and in many aspects downright depraved government.
According to BBC:
Switzerland is to re-open all shops, restaurants, bars, and museums from 11 May.
Come now, let us not talk of killing Chinese
I don’t know. Perhaps we should. A few of us clearly have extremely short or selective memories but most of us do remember the events of June 4, 1989. Or should we blame Donald Trump for that?
The Chinese Communist Party has never seemed to be as squeamish as we are about killing Chinese people. Now, whether deliberately, recklessly or negligently, it has caused the death of a quarter of a million souls – and counting.
So let’s not compare Presidents Xi Jinping and Donald Trump. It’s a long while since the Republican Party ordered the US army to machine-gun its citizens in a city square.
