But seriously, “Nuobell” sells them for $750 a set. The factory sells them for $56. No brainer, right?
Well… the min. quantity you can order is 2 sets. Which is still cheaper. Then there’s shipping from China, at $200. Which is still cheaper. Then there’s waiting two months and wondering if they’ll make it through customs, which is… cheaper?
Anyway, the only real downside so far is the immense amount of spam I’m getting now that I used my email address on fking Alibaba. And apparently, according to Reddit, you can expect to receive random items from businesses desperate to get you to resell their crap, so I listed myself as a “fitness/gym/hunting/camping” business, because those things would be useful.
Whenever you order something from “China” you’re probably dealing with multiple middlemen and questionable shipping. As the Asian guardian of the West, Taiwan is often where the middlemen are. They are there to facilitate whatever cheap crap China makes and deliver it to you…but…
There is a whole segment of fake online merchants who will take your info and ordering info, and the item will eventually be “delivered” but you won’t see it, and you’ll have to request a refund. That’s because the order is a fake, and the whole thing is shenanigans designed to ID you and collect whatever they can about you.
You can spot these shady vendors because there tend to be 30 different business names, all selling the same targeted ad products. It’s like an orb spider web, just waiting for you to get close. Spider webs have two functions, to trap prey and transmit signal…
I get daily emails and messages on Linkedin offering all kinds of products relating to our industry from China for amazing prices.
Some within our industry use steel fixings from China.
They are appalling quality and poorly designed with zero test certification.
We are condemning their installations for their customers every few months.
My understanding is that if you have an agreement with a chinese manufacturer and ask them to make something to a high standard they will do so but if you leave them to their own devices to sell to individual gweilo without a corporate quality control mechanism or prior agreement on quality backed by a continual business arrangement then in the absence of religion in your life to pray to God then good luck is what you will need to receive anything decent or as described.
Have you ever seen Michael Mann’s “The Keep”? Radu Molasar?
The whole security paradox is this: are you trying to keep soldiers out, or something inside, in.
The whole Eli Roth tunnel scene…ripped straight from Mann, just without the awesome Tangerine Dream score, and no Jurgen Prochnow. The guy David Lynch chose to be Duke Leto Atreides.
I fully expect that I might get 160 lbs of dildos or something. In which case, I’ll drive across the border into NH to donate them to the libertarians.
So in conclusion, this is only one of the two sets I thought I’d purchased—the interface was kinda weird like that. Even if the other one doesn’t come, and I got “screwed” technically, I saved $400 over the same exact ones I would have otherwise bought:
