Slightly OT ...

goods.

chair

hole

using

is

in

But part of the fun was trying to interpret instructions in only nominal English like "Turn line of fleche to plate spiggot mark A to fixture inverted B"

-- Diverse Devices, Southampton, England electronic hints and repair briefs , schematics/manuals list on

The solution to this problem is to not buy Chinese goods. Or Korean goods, or Japanese goods, or whatever. Another possible solution is to force China to let its currency rise in value. A third solution is to prevent incorporated businesses from setting up manufacturing overseas, which is fundamentally immoral.

One of the arguments in favor of "free" trade is that each country will specialize in whatever it does best. Baloney. All human beings are equally intelligent and capable. As the Chinese realize that Japan's success was not due to lower prices as much as it was to consistent high quality, they will produce products that further destroy manufacturing in Western countries. Just wait until they start manufacturing high-quality cars that sell for $4000.

It is possible to imagine an inverted world in which the "third-world" countries do most of the manufacturing, while the "first-world" and "second-world" countries produce most of the food. (Notice I said "imagine".)

God help us if the Chinese get serious... Thanks for the warning.

Dave

Arfa.... I bought the same chair here in Toronto from Staples and while I picked it up at the store, I found exactly the same thing. I was really impressed how the small parts were blister packed and the thread lock on the screws. Regards Lee

"William Sommerwerck" wrote in message news:YaudnfWQ1cebhM3anZ2dnUVZ snipped-for-privacy@comcast.com...

This is *a* solution, but not really a very practical one. For a start, it might be hard to know where something is made, as in for instance buying something on the 'net, as this chair was. I might have made a reasonable guess that it was a 'Made in China' item, but had no real way of knowing until it arrived. If you want *any* kind of mainstream consumer electronic item now, it would be hard to find a domestically manufactured example. Do you, for instance, have any indiginous TV or DVD manufacturing in the US now ? We haven't had in the UK for years ...

But is it ? Surely, it's equally immoral for any country to try to dictate to its indiginous companies, how they should construct their business model in order to turn a profit ? And if you are then going to be fair about it, do you stop all of the foreign companies that set up and invest in the US or the UK to avoid import restrictions or whatever, from doing so ? Would there be anybody in the US ready and waiting to take up the slack in lost jobs, that would result ? Setting aside the 'exploitation' arguments that immediately get thrown into the arena when you start talking foreign manufacturing, are American and European companies doing a bad thing by investing in those 'third world' countries, and would the inhabitants be better off, if the manufacturing companies were not there giving them work ?

I'm not too sure about that one. Setting globalisation of manufacturing aside for a minute, I think that there is still a large degree of specialisation attached to various countries around the world, albeit with somewhat fuzzier edges than was the case a couple of decades back. I'm not at all sure that I agree with you with regard to the Japanese success story. I think maybe you have a short memory, or possibly, Europe saw more Japanese manufacturing output, than the US did, in the early days. Here, most Japanese imported stuff was known as "Jap Crap", and was especially known for being plastic and 'cheap and nasty'. Their cars were well known for just rotting away into rust buckets, almost before they needed their first roadworthiness test at 3 years old. "Consistent high quality" is the last description that most people would have used. It was only as they learnt their lessons, that the quality improved, to the point where it overtook western manufactured goods, probably around the early to late 70s, when they really started global marketing of highly targeted consumer goods like TV sets, VCRs, motorcycles, cars and so on. The Koreans already manufacture pretty reasonable cars at very cheap prices. A few visits back, I hired a car on-airport in the US, and it was a Korean KIA Sedona. I drove it around for two weeks and, although it was not the 'smartest' car on the block, with the most features or top notch finish, it was never-the-less perfectly adequate and comfortable, and did exactly what it said on the can. Certainly no worse than some bottom end Fords that I have driven.

And that would be bad because ... ?

Arfa

You can't find much in the US that isn't made in China these days. Some of it is very high quality (usually well known name brands) and some total junk (off brand crap.)

model

or

there

?

It is fundamentally immoral, based on the assumptions underlying the creation of limited-liability corporations. I'll explain it, if you want.

equally

they

countries.

$4000.

story.

Japanese

just

they

around

with

Certainly

As Marty McFly said to Doc Brown... "Gee, Doc, all the best stuff comes from Japan."

I didn't say that Japanese products are all good, or have always been good.

The Japanese made good photo equipment not long after WWII. (There was a recent Popular Photography article about this. Nikon and Canon weren't successful merely because their cameras and lenses cost less.) And though there was plenty of "Jap crap" in the early '50s, the mid-'50s saw the rise of the Japanese consumer-electronics business, which gradually overwhelmed the American (partly with Richard Nixon's help).

One reason for Japanese success was their recognition that they were fundamentally an exporting nation. They therefore paid attention not only to quality, but to reliability. This is the reason Japanese electronics tend to break down less often than American or European. (American products, regardless of their cost, seem to have problems with poor solder joints.)

The famous statistician W. Edwards Deming famously said that "You cannot _inspect_ quality into a product." That is, you can't discard the bad samples and expect the remainder to be of high quality. The quality and reliability of anything depend on its basic design, and how well it's manufactured. American companies learned this too late. (See the Wikipedia article.)

It wouldn't necessarily be bad, but it would be weird.

Here in Australia, recently a couple of Chinese produced goods developed notoriety for being dangerous, however I have also found many Chinese made products to be of very high quality. I have also been concerned at what the future is for the West with all the cheap and high quality goods flooding the market.

Not to mention, in possibly a separate OT thread, about the infrastructure of Western corporations (such as call centres, hr, etc.) being run out of third world countries, some of which do it very efficiently.

As far as us being food producers, well, it's feasible for countries like China to gear themselves up for that too. We seem to be surviving on "the mineral boom" here right now. I don't know what the long-term future will be for us though.

Henry.

Somehow I don't think people in a country can survive very long selling hamburgers and insurance policies to each other. You have to manufacture something or you'l be dead in a couple of generations.

I think the idea is to mark up what others manufacture.

--
                 Angry American flags attack Hillary Clinton!

On Fri, 30 Nov 2007 09:44:33 GMT, "Arfa Daily" put finger to keyboard and composed:

Both my swivel chairs have broken after a couple of years of use. I repaired one (by drilling an existing bracket and adding a bolt), but the other chair needs to be welded.

Twenty years ago my US employer got away with selling gas-lift swivel chairs at extortionate prices by calling them Pneumatic Seating Units. These lasted no longer than the usual junk.

- Franc Zabkar

--
Please remove one 'i' from my address when replying by email.

When my 10 yo daughter decided to learn guitar, she used a cheap (I mean

*really* cheap) Chinese acoustic. It worked okay, but was no masterpiece. When she joined a band, we decided it was time for an electric.

I searched want ads, pawn shops and talked to friends. (I'm in Nashville, after all.) I couldn't come up with a better deal than the $100 Chinese Ibanez Les Paul Jr from the Guitar Center. The instrument got very good reviews on the web. It is very nice--now--after a few trips back to GC...had a bad habit of breaking E-strings due to a burr on the bridge.

Aside from that, it's got a nice straight neck, good electronics and decent tuners. It may not last forever, but it's great for a pre-teener's first rock & roll guitar.

I figure it will be around 5-10 years before the 'average' quality of goods imported from China will be superb, like what happened in Japan, only quicker. By then the era of cheap (but good) Chinese goods will go the way of cheap (but good) Japanese stuff. That will be due partly to the evolution of the goods, as well as the improved economic conditions for the Chinese people.

Better get it while you can.

jak

They may well be the next Japan, of course the question is how long can they sustain it? From what I hear, there's a big problem with pollution in China, as well as working conditions and wages are terrible.

>

I rented a Hyundai Sonata last year in San Jose...drove it on a winery tour in the San Jose Mountains, an up through San Francisco and on north from there. I took that car on almost every conceivable kind of road from one-lane gravel in the mountains, to the freeway, and back down the coast to SJ.

I must say, I was *very* impressed...so much so that if I were ever in the market for a new car (not likely), I'd certainly consider this one...quiet, comfortable, nimble, with oodles of trunk space.

This year I rented a Ford Fusion for a week. It was not even in the same class, IMHO. It was noisy and felt unrefined and underpowered...yet costs more than the Hyundai.

It's not difficult to imagine, 'cause it's happening now. Despite my admiration for the fruits of Asian labor, I still wish it wasn't so. I long for the almost lost tradition of skilled workers in this country, producing quality goods that the rest of the world covets. Partly it has to do with prestige, I suppose. More than that, however is the affinity to the production of tangibles, stuff one can hold up and admire...tradition, I guess.

I'm not enough of an economist to understand the ramifications, but it seems to me that we can't buy 'everything' without selling *anything*. Perhaps I'm naive, but we send a lot more money out of this country than we take in. Some day that's gotta come to a bad end....

jak

I think you'd better explain that. Fundamentally immoral? Come on...especially when you conclude by saying:

It wouldn't necessarily be bad, but it would be weird.

jak

jak

The 'working conditions and wages' one is interesting (sorry all, that this has got so far OT - I wasn't expecting it to generate quite so much interest, but most of it does have at least a tangential impact on servicing !)

I saw a banner headline in one of the newspapers that I read a couple of weeks ago, on just this issue. You may be aware that we have a new leader of the existing government here in the UK. He is nothing like as 'charismatic' as Blair was, and the political sharks are seeing this as an opportunity to give them a good kicking, and seek to discredit them in any way that they can. It turns out that some senior minister - I think it was even the trade minister (!) but I could be wrong - has some relation that owns tea or coffee or some such plantations, and the headline screamed that they were only being paid what to us, was some ridiculously small amount of a pound a day - might have been more or less but you get the picture. I think there was also something about conditions that they were sleeping 10 to a room or something. Anyway, when you got past the headlines, and looked into it a bit, turned out that the average wage in that particular country was only like half what they were paying, and the 10 to a room thing was in a dormitory that was provided by the company for the workers to 'sleep over' at the end of a shift, if they lived too far away to travel, which many did, as these were the only major employer for miles around.

So, whilst it's easy for us all to jump on the 'pay and conditions' issue as a moral excuse for not supporting third world manufacturing, it might not always be quite as black and white as it appears. It's also part of the 'west is best' culture, that seeks to convert the rest of the world to what we think is 'right' but that's another whole story !

That's not to say that there are not western companies who *are* exploiting such people, but probably not quite to the degree that some would have us believe ...

Arfa

night,

is

and

in

used

a

chance

several

groups,

western

in

this

servicing

of

'charismatic'

to

trade

a

or

did,

as

what

exploiting

Quoting that someone earns 10 dollars a day, or whatever, is meaningless. The method of comparison is how many pints of milk, or some other basic necessity ,could he buy for one hours work.

-- Diverse Devices, Southampton, England electronic hints and repair briefs , schematics/manuals list on

be

work.

Yes, they are doing a bad thing. US companies are not obliged to give people in other countries work. Why should American workers suffer to benefit someone else?

want.

Here we go with another major argument.

Incorporated businesses have a privilege not granted to individuals -- limited liability. In general, the people who incorporate are not liable for more than the money they initially invest in the business. This is not true of unincorporated individuals, who are responsible for all debts their businesses incur.

Why are corporations granted that privilege? The idea is to encourage the creation of large or risky businesses that would not be possible or practical if the people investing were responsible for the business's debts. (Think about this before you rush to object.)

Large or risky businesses are potentially a benefit to society, right? So the ultimate purpose of limited-liability corporations is to benefit society, not to benefit the investors. The investors therefore have an obligation to society in return for the economic privileges they receive.

One of these obligations is to employ people in the business's country, not send jobs overseas. They are also obliged to pay taxes, just as individuals do. (I no longer buy Stanley products, after they incorporated overseas to avoid American taxes. Wouldn't it be great if _individuals_ could do that?)

This is ALL I will say on this subject. I will not get into further discussion. If you think that businesses exist for no other reason than to make a profit for their stockholders, that they have no social or moral obligations to the societies which permit their creation and give them special rights... What can I say?

Yes ! Exactly the point.

Arfa