the japanese are very smartly doing this to prevent building up the industries of their economic competitors and military enemies. this is exactly the situation we face, so why can't we?
and to anyone that says we can't do it here because of "the unions", i say "bullshit". "the unions" have stood about scratching their asses while their members' jobs have been sent to china [at taxpayer expense], and not a cheep have we heard. "the unions" have stood about scratching their asses while their members' retiree benefits have been either slashed or even eliminated, and not a cheep have we heard. "the unions" are completely ineffective and are these days merely a convenient political scapegoat.
we need to keep industrial production domestic. automation is the way to go.
It is not the unions that are the problem in the US. It is the short term thinking of the exectutives that run many major US compnaies. The way they see it - why spent billions on new plants and equipment, when the Chinese will offer to build the product and ship it to the US for less than the cost of the labor in the US? It seems to me the executives can only see to the end of the next quarter and they have such a high opinion of their own worth, they figure they'll always get paid big bucks no matter how poor the rest of the country becomes. Personally, I'd like to outsource a few CEO jobs.
Because the infrastructure isn't there any longer. 25 years ago here I could do bottom to top electronics manufacture.... there were a bunch of local board fab houses. There were a bunch of guys who could stamp out panels and engrave them. There was a screw machine company, and a couple companies that stuffed boards.
All of these places are gone. I held out shipping the PCB work out of the area as long as I could... but when all the PCB houses were gone, they were gone. I held out shipping fastener work out of town until the last guy with a screw machine shut down.
Almost all of our in-house mechanical stuff was being done with surplus tooling from bigger manufacturing operations. As those operations shut down, the surplus stuff disappeared and our only choice now is to buy new or contract it out to someplace out of the area.
You cannot run a small manufacturing operation in isolation. You cannot make a big manufacturing operation without starting out with a small one.
I'm willing to pay a little more for local production, just so I can drive over to the factory and see what is going on, and I can get good turnaround times on special projects. But, there isn't any more local production. It's gone.
Industrial production is not a thing you can do without substantial infrastructure, unless you have the enormous budget required to set up a vertically-integrated facility. We had that infrastructure. It took a century to build up. Now it's gone.
Listen to Steve Jobs' comments about why Apple isn't going to be returning to US manufacturing any time soon, he describes the basic issues very well.
The world runs on greed. I can't argue with your assessment of CEOs, but let's not lose sight of what drives them. Stakeholders want one thing...PROFIT.
Would you transfer your investments to companies who's charter disclosed that it was their intention to charge much higher prices their competitors?
Would you pay 40% more for a television made in the USA?
I routinely buy electronic items from China. They get shipped to my door for a total cost around a buck. Or, I could spend $5 on gas to the local store and pay $10 for it... and it'd still be from China.
I'm all for patriotism, but the economics are so far out of whack that It's hard to practice it. I sympathize with all the people out of work. I've been unemployed since '95. But I still gotta eat. Buying cheap Chinese crap assists in that endeavor.
Everything got shipped overseas because the American people wanted too much money for their work. A co-worker friend of mine went on a tour of a GM plant. What pissed him off was one of the workers sitting reading a newspaper on the line. He'd look up. walk over to the car, snap a piece into place, and walk back to his newspaper until the next car came along.. Should this guy be making $25hr???? I think not!
I would, if it was also their intention to make a better product in the process. Coca-Cola is a good example of a company whose stated policy is to charge more than their competitors.
I would pay 40% more for a television that did not have RoHS solder and had properly derated high quality electrolytic capacitors. It would last more than twice as long, so paying more would seem a reasonable thing to do.
I don't really care if it's made in China or not, what I care about is that it is not crappy. The problem is that making products abroad means it is very difficult to have control over the production and in the case of Chinese manufacturer it is apt to get you a crappy product.
The problem is that consumers want low prices and they don't care about quality. They -say- they care about quality, but when they are offered the chance to spend more money on a better product, few of them do.
Consequently, there are very few better quality products in the marketplace and because they are made in far fewer numbers than the cheap crap, the price on them rises even higher because they don't get the benefits of large scale production to bring costs down.
Products today aren't made to last. They all have a lifespan now. Pretty bad 90% of the flat screen owners I know have had some kind of problem with their tv's needing a tech. to come out and replace a board or whatever.
I got lucky with my 42" flatscreen I picked up for free. Stuck a $20 transistor in it, and it's been fine ever since. I'm afraid to purchase a new one.. If I do I'll get an extended warranty.
It's difficult to tell. There's cheap noname crap. Then, there's expensive brand-name stuff that's cheap crap under the hood. The Good stuff is very difficult to identify, and will be MUCH more expensive. We live in a disposable society. Fashion changes so fast that we buy a new one before the old one is dead. For most of us, cheap is the better alternative overall.
Sounds like you agree that the problem is US! CEO's are caught in the middle making boatloads of cash.
I guess Apple is counting on the Chinese buying their over-priced products when US citizens are too poor to buy them. Apple could easily build I-pads in the US and still make a boat load of cash. Instead, they make them in China and make a slightly larger boat load of cash while in the long run contributing to the crumbling of the US economy. I suppose multi-millionaires look at things differently, but I hope they look in the mirror when a Chavez wannbe gets enough votes from disgruntled former workers to get elected and go after them. The rich have been remarkably successful at buying elections in the past, but occasionally some wacko gets close. One day a left wing wacko might make it all the way to the top.
Less than a single block, but I should really get more. It's a great business, they pump water out of the ground, add a small amount of stuff to it, and sell it for $0.75/can. How can you beat that?
These are often the same, with a different label. It's made worse by the Chinese practice of buying up old-line American brand names. So now you get stuff marked RCA and Bell and Howell which is in fact the same crap in a different package.
Right, but it did not use to be much more expensive, it used to be only a little more expensive. However, the current state of affairs has changed this.
I disagree, in part because the actual costs of cheap gear are a lot higher than they appear.
Yes, but I don't have a solution for it. The way free markets work is that most people get what they want, and the rest get what most people want because that's what there is. This is sometimes great, and sometimes bad, and when people want crap it's bad.
CEOs serve at the will of the shareholders, and the shareholders care about short-term profits.
You cannot build stuff like that in this country in any volumes. The support infrastructure to build a factory to make that sort of equipment is just not there. You cannot build a factory in isolation.
Two decades ago you could build a manufacturing facility in this country. Today there are a few places where you can build some manufacturing work, but a lot of the high tech stuff is just not possible to build because you not only have to build the factory, you have to build the factory that makes the parts for the factory and the factory that makes the parts for THAT factory and the parts that make the tooling for the factory that makes the parts for the factory.
There was support infrastructure. Now it is is gone. You can wring your hands about it, but I don't see anyone proposing any actual fix. If there IS an actual fix, it's going to be a fix that will take many decades to implement, just as it took many decades to build up the manufacturing infrastructure that we have now lost.
cigarettes. not only does tobacco just grow out of the ground, its buyers are addicted - you can charge pretty much whatever you want.
what i hate is being charged "made in usa" prices for stuff made in china. vice grips are the perfect example - a brand bought by irwin, [part of rubber maid i think], and production shipped to china. they still charge the same price even though it's not costing them a fraction to produce. and to add insult to injury, they have the temerity to call them "original"! i won't buy irwin brand tools any more.
indeed.
indeed. china cuts prices to below cost on stuff they want to monopolize. like rare earths for example.
i don't want crap. and i'm prepared to pay not to have crap. but my sensibilities of "how much" one should pay not to have crap really get tested sometimes. example: i've owned and enjoyed a snap-on ratchet for many years. it's been completely reliable and has always worked great. so, a few years back, thinking that maybe i'd get one of the new [actually useful] 80-tooth ratchets i go online, and find that they'd stopped making ratchets with quick-release heads. eh? that was one of the real differentiators for snap-on - why everyone paid the extra to get them. so the years roll on, and i go online again, and find that finally, they've seen the light, and brought the quick-release back, [only for limited parts of the range] but they have what i want, so i get one.
what a disappointment. the ratchet direction lever now sticks out and gets snagged on stuff the old one never did. the quick release button is large and easily depressed - allowing it to release accidentally. the 80-teeth thing sometimes miss and slip. but the real cherry on the disappointment cake is it /doesn't/ have "made in usa" stamped into it.
seriously, if i pay snap-on pricing, i want "SNAP-ON - MADE IN USA" stamped on the damned thing. big time.
and their pricing is way too high. craftsman are not the same quality, but they're not 30% the quality as snap-on's pricing would suppose. snap-on need to get their house in order. a classic example of a domestic losing the plot, resting on their laurels, and paying too many managers way too much money.
if there were a strategic political objective of turning the proles into docile, impoverished, impotent debt slaves, it would be hard to think of a more brilliantly executed program than our program of "de-industrialization".
the unions are useless, sure, but they're simply a scape goat. i have a close relationship with someone in a certain multinational with significant operations overseas in both germany and asia. in germany, the unions have /real/ power - and i get to hear all about it - no firing of underachievers for instance. yet this company's german profits are much higher than their asian operations. why? because they're highly productive, despite the union b.s. and germany is a high cost base for taxes, transportation, land, environmental compliance, etc. too, so that really means something.
japan's a /much/ more expensive country to operate in than here, but they're biting the bullet and keeping production on shore for strategic reasons, while maintaining economic production.
it'll be "let the wars begin" if we don't figure this stuff out.
Defeatist BS. How long did it take China to go from rice patties to a meaga-industrial power? How long after WWII for the Germans and Japanese to rebuild their industries?
If you think Obama is some sort of left wing wacko, you aren't really paying attention. He is a tool of the ultra-rich maybe even more so that GWB was.
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