Import substitution: finally, officials will understand how much the brains of our engineers cost

Dmitry Milin,analyst

A little bit about class hatred.

All these years of the “resource curse” with Russian engineers and scientists (engineering firms), the conversation was quite simple: “You have to make products no worse than Western ones and cheaper than Chinese ones, you can’t go wherever you want (i.e. with “three letters”) , we will buy everything abroad in China or in the West.” And most of all, those officials and managers who wanted to get a “kickback”, sometimes several times higher than the cost of this equipment, were indignant at the high cost of domestic equipment.

They were echoed by the townsfolk (mainly fed from the budget at the expense of "natural rent" or their ability to receive "kickbacks"), outraged why Russian engineers, who receive 5-10 times less than their Western counterparts in a country that spends several times less on R&D, than other countries cannot make them an iPhone-level phone and a price comparable to it.

In the same way, everyone thought that a Russian company with a production volume of 1,000 units should have a cost equal to or even lower than a foreign company with a production volume of 100,000 or even millions of units.

This was based on the belief that Russian engineers should receive salaries incomparably lower than in other countries in order to ensure a high level of consumption of their fellow citizens who are able to "get settled in life." In the extreme case, Russian consumers could be proud of the achievements of their engineers in the sense of "look what cool fuckers we have" (in a sense similar to serfdom).

Especially, of course, all sorts of "progressors" stood out, who, having mastered the "iPhone", considered themselves advanced technology managers and entrepreneurs with ideas on how to make a processor cooler than Intel's for "three kopecks".

In this sense, the managers of Sberbank turned out to be the coolest of all, living by robbing old women with commissions for housing and communal services and transfers of individuals by cards, when they were surprised why servers running on domestic processors were inferior in performance to industry leaders who spent hundreds of billions of dollars on development, against tens of billions of rubles. spent on the development of domestic processors.

And then there were sanctions, when everything that “you could always buy” became either much more expensive, or even impossible to buy. Budget revenues began to decline due to the rejection of Russian energy sources and money to support such a large number of state employees will soon cease to be enough, as well as the opportunity to live on "kickbacks" will also be reduced.

And here the state and society will face the need to buy domestic, and more expensive. And in order to replace inaccessible or more expensive equipment, we will have to pay the remaining "survivors" over the years to Russian engineering companies as much as they ask or be left without equipment.

And all these arrogant officials and managers from state-owned companies, after layoffs, will have to go to the labor market to compete for a place with guest workers at the mop or for a construction trowel. This is the highest justice!