When I was a kid, "Made in Japan" was still a negative. But the Japanese got good at making quality products, to the point where (starting in the 1970s) their cars were better than ours.
My experience with stuff made in China--it varies. But I have learned to take a pass on stuff I'm considering buying on Amazon if a) it isn't going to arrive until about 6 weeks from now; b) it has a brand name that's even more random-sounding than the ones assigned to American pharmauceuticals; c) there's anything unclear or inconsistent about the description; d) it involves socks, because they're always going to be too small no matter what size you go with.
I had a 1972 Honda 600 coupe. the 600 was the engine size (or you might say, a 0.6L engine). About 36 horsepower. 10 inch rims. top seed 58mph (interstate speed limit then was 55). I used a brick as the cruise control. The former owner cut the roof off, made it a convertible. He was a house painter so he put stands on the bumper, so he could haul ladders with it.
Loads of fun! I drove it three years before the engine died.
My take. Hopefully not irritating my well informed Sino expert, Kurt.
I first traveled to Shanghai in 1983. Gave a seminar on plastics in the Automotive and other applications. 50 old school slides (a color Marketing slide cost $100 to $300 ea, handmade then). The bulb burnt out. No replacement.
So, in hot steamy July, with 1930s iron based desks and a slow moving fan to circulate the open windowed room, at the Shanghai Institute of Technology, 50 PhD from Beijing and Shanghai watched me scrawl a chalk over slate blackboard for 6 hours. A few good questions.
In that era, the view of BigCorp, which had invested in (ie gave, not took) a couple plants in Shanghai, was China could do theory but not engineering production. That changed!!
I walked along the Bund, river parks across from the old Peace Hotel. White short sleeved shirts. Everyone. I was a proud American. Assuaging fears about Reagan and the US. Fabulous.
Driving in Shanghai in1983, on Stalinist boulevards and buildings, it dawned on me. One car every 5 minutes. But bicycles!!! 10 across, 100 deep going both directions. I said to my English speaking driver, you have many bicycles! He said yes. We make about about ---- 300 million bikes a year, with earned pride.
I realized then, that Manufacturing in China was only a when, not if question.
I did not approve and still don't of the "Lets free trade everything". China is an asymmetrical power player. The American paradigm of quarterly results to drive short term game, is easy easy prey for long term players. The Chinese culture is very long term. I would not have allowed Walmart to evolve into ChinaMart. It was unwatched, unexpected. Like a tea kettle with no whistle. Uncontrolled systems fail. They end up pushing to extremes.
But Clinton and Bush didnt care. Business at large wanted lower cost more profits.
The Business advantage of China, is in fact its China Industrial policy. It's ability to manipulate American business.
My final take, is, we exported 20 million jobs, a million small businesses (remember the local hardware, clothing stores?), and a chunk of middle class - with the diminishing benefit of creating that middle class in China. Which is some brake on a China invasion of Taiwan and Nuclear war.
Nothing irritates me. If people read what I write and conclude I am pro-China, anti-America, vice versa, or whatever, they're not reading what I wrote.
Your take is accurate. "We" created our current problem due to forces most publications do nothing to examine or explain. "We" imagined we'd be going in with an army of MBA's to do the management and the Chinese would gladly and willingly be supplicants to our imagined superiority in business management and execution. Nope.
Our policy, if one can apply the term here, was based in complete and utter ignorance of the world and in overwhelming hubris. We turned loose powers that we imagined we controlled. Wrong.
The next mess will be when China's service industries overtake our own. Who here has read about or even knows the PwC mess created by what were very obvious and extremely lousy accounting and auditing practices in the collapse of Evergrande? We helped blow up the Chinese housing market in the same manner that our players were complicit in creating our housing market collapse in '08.
I don’t read you as being “pro-China” or “anti-America”, just trying to get people to be fairer in their assessments rather than knee-jerk anti-China. Which itself is a pretty American trait: encouraging fairness.
Thank you. The narratives from our side are not connected to reality. Interestingly, the narratives from the other side...not the top level propagandistic proclamation stuff but the multitudes of highly intelligent policy papers from their top academics and policy people...are remarkably insightful. Put another way, if folks are getting their information from the NYT or WSJ...highly biased idiotic reporting of selected specifics...then folks have no connection to what's going on.
His perspective is not different. It is the same as mine. I just describe events and social conditions differently. I have learned that to talk about China in anything other than criticisms and popular American media perspectives, folks imagine I'm cheerleading for China.
If anything, my time in China has informed me how American viewpoints develop, which in simple terms is idiotic decontextualized nonsense.
I have few dreams, one of them being the hope that old men will stop creating diversions leading to wars that young men die in. I am a globalist to the core, which means understanding what the world is and acting accordingly. So far, America is not acting intelligently, let alone accordingly.
It seems that no matter how much we create and innovate to get more competitive, we'll always be at a huge disadvantage due to the reality that there are possibly billions of Chinese people willing to work for a small fraction of what America workers can make. Combine that with the government being willing to do anything necessary financially or otherwise to ensure the success of their industries, and it's a bleak picture for anyone trying to compete. But China is facing serius headwinds, primarily demographic ones, as their population ages and needs to be cared for by a shrinking worker base. Can the government just print money to keep afloat? Time will tell.
Lost in the discussion is American's complete misunderstanding (ignorance) of what life in China is like. It's hard. Harder than any description I could provide would elucidate. All my friends grew up in mud huts with dirt floors, working 18-20 hour days 7 days a week knee deep in rice paddies fertilized with their own shit for something less than pennies.
Working a factory line, any line in any condition, is vastly preferable to peasant farming, which up until just a few decades ago is what 95%+ of all Chinese did to survive. We can't, and aren't, going to be able to compete in manufacturing. All the silly talk over here ignores where this is going. They care about US and the Euros business, but they care more about emerging markets, which they happen to be in geographic center of.
This morning's mashup reminds me of Gramsci’s famous line about the interregnum...
"The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying but the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear."
Things are always in flux, as I'll write in an article later this week. When you're in the middle of it, you can't see either the present or the future very clearly.
For something completely different, I'm trying to get the new Finance Council chairman at my church to answer two questions, each answerable with a "yes" or "no."
The good news is he answered my email, which the previous chairwoman would never have done. The bad news is he didn't know the answer: he had to ask the Business Manager, who is also new. The good news is that building fund contributions are firmly sequestered from the parish general fund. The bad news is they don't seem to be able to answer the "flip side" question, "Are funds from the general collection going to the building debt?"
As a twist, Jim My Fixer called and explained that the answer is, "Yes, but it's temporary," and also that he thinks the new business manager and Finance Council chairman are okay, but they were left with a mess by their predecessors, and they were also left with deep reservoirs of distrust and personal animus that it's not really fair to dump on them. Yet.
I'm now waiting to see whether the Financial Council will be able to find out from the business manager what Jim already told me. As a side note, people's reading comprehension is really lacking. I feel obnoxious repeating my questions and explaining that the answer will be either "yes" or "no," but otherwise, I'll just get inconclusive and irrelevant roundaboutation.
This reminds me a little of what went on in my small condo association after The B----h sold her unit and departed the board. Fortunately most people understood the situation, and even more fortunately, the new president and others made a deliberate effort to signal a new era of openness and fairness and neighborliness. The messes were not cleaned up overnight, but the contrast with the old ways was encouraging.
Sometimes I think about eventually moving to a condo. Then our friends tell us some of the hassles involving the association, not to mention the neighbors!
A difference is that our new people aren't making any deliberate efforts. It's possible, Jim says, that they don't know how deeply and deservedly their predecessors were detested.
Katie is on vacation this week. She is sleeping in, sewing, just relaxing. 😀
We drove to Jasper for the weekend, and visited with my family. Lynn let her kids prep the food for the birthday party and...we have leftovers. At lunch the next day we had, leftovers. I joked that in some versions of the bible, it reads "the little boy with his loaves of bread and fishes, plus whatever the Janney family brought". We came home with 3 dozen cupcakes, I'll take them to school for students to eat....
The highlight was staying at a Holiday Inn Express with the automatic pancake maker. You push a button, and can watch your pancake flow along the assembly line. Within a minute two pancakes fall off the rollers! I want one, Katie is afraid the dogs would learn to push the button and feed themselves.
I actually looked up the cost: $3,800. I cannot justify that amount.... doggone it! 😢
One of my earliest literary fascinations was the book "Homer Price and the Donut Machine", a classic by Robert McCloskey, a wonderful story of youthful exuberance gone awry in trying to mechanize his Uncle's (I think it was his uncle...memory is fuzzy) coffee shop donut operation. There was some amount of The Sorcerer's Apprentice to the tale.
The Holiday Inn Express (Jasper) is above average. It's free, so the food is not gourmet, but it is fresh and clean.
The pancake maker is about 2 ft by 1 ft, and it has rollers in it. the pancake batter drops in, it moves along the conveyor belt, and when it is done it rolls onto a waiting plate. Or, if you're a dog, onto the floor. You buy giant bags of batter, load the bag in, and something squeezes batter onto the conveyor system.
I can picture the dogs!! 😂 It’s interesting how a hotel chain can vary so much. I remember staying with my mom at some old chain I hadn’t seen in years, and it was so nice. Most of them don’t seem to be very well maintained, and I have a feeling they don’t use “quality” anything. I remember one place where the microwave was filthy, and people were still using it! 🤢
My only personal experience of Chinese competition shutting down US industries is with a friend who owned a wood crafts parts manufacturing company in our economically depressed area of WV. He was one of the few remaining companies providing employment in our area. He explained to me how it was cheaper for Michaels, etc to buy & ship their wood craft kits from China than buy from him, even with the very low wages in our area. He went out of business shortly thereafter. It devastated his family as well as being just one more step in the continued closure of all major employers in our area.
I am still a free-trader, but I can see the errors being committed by our political leadership, as outlined in the article today.
Meanwhile, here in the southern part of the state, the coal industry was running like gangbusters until about 2008, when the Obama administration entered the scene by canceling a whole fleet of mining permits, strangling the regional economy for the next several years.
Coal is still in global high demand, but the federal government has done everything in its powers when in D-party control to prevent mining—as well as burning any fossil fuels at all. They keep shuttering coal-fired power plants, driving up electricity costs (you should see what the electric companies are requesting from PSCs), and chasing energy intensive manufacturing to countries like China where they do whatever they can to make electricity cheap and abundant.
The coal mining industries recovered here, but they didn’t bounce back to boom-time employment and production levels. People moved away—and continue to do so.
Also, as a WV resident, you’ve probably heard the back-and-forth about the gypsum wallboard factories along the Ohio. That’s another business where its’ cheaper to import from Chinese factories than produce locally—arguably thanks to laxer eco regulations than American communities would ever tolerate.
I might have to delete my remark about copying Kurt’s response, because I would like to link to this article. We’ve been striking up some excellent conversations here, and it’s nice to be able to do so without having anyone go off the deep end!
I did not know. I grew up in Wood County and had an 80ac farm in Greenbrier County. Most of friends, like I, went out of state college. A couple came back for WVU medical school and law school.
As a start to what might go on for a while...depending on too many contingencies to list...I have this observation....
Washington blames China’s dominance of the solar industry and rapidly advancing state of the art manufacturing of literally EVERYTHING on what are routinely dubbed “unfair trade practices". That’s just a comforting myth.
China’s edge doesn’t come from a conspiratorial plot hatched by an authoritarian government. It hasn’t been driven by state-owned manufacturers, subsidized loans to factories, tariffs on imported modules or theft of foreign technological expertise. Instead, it’s come from private businesses convinced of a bright future, investing aggressively and luring global talent to a booming industry — exactly the entrepreneurial mix that made the US an industrial powerhouse.
I have never experienced a citizenship that is more hardwired for entrepreneurial capitalistic activity than Chinese. The Chinese miracle of the last 40 years is very simple. When the government took its boot off the necks of the Chinese population, the joint exploded with characteristic capitalistic fervor.
The fall of America as a manufacturing powerhouse is a tragedy of errors where myopic corporate leadership, timid financing, oligopolistic complacency and policy chaos allowed the US and Europe to neglect their own industries. That left a yawning gap that was filled by Chinese start-ups, sprouting like saplings in a forest clearing. If rich democracies are playing to win the clean energy and every other manufacturing revolution, they need to learn the lessons of what went wrong, rather than just comfort themselves with fairy tales about those evil Chinese. And, what went wrong is very simple. It was us.
Chinese are really good at this stuff. They've been really good at it since well before the Tang Dynasty which was roughly around 600-900 CE, i.e., 1500-ish years. By the time of the Tang, they were shipping over a million pieces of porcelain all over their known world (caliphates in the Middle East, the African Kingdoms, the ASEAN, the Stans, etc.) in stunningly well developed manufacturing and distribution systems extending from Jingdezhen in central Jianxi and down through man made canals and waterways through to Guangdong and (then) Canton. They also developed what we would now call international banking over a millennium ago. They were very good at that too, and kept vast money reserves in the walled city of Pingyao up in Shanxi...or Shaanxi....I forget which one it is and yes, they have two provinces whose pronunciations are differentiated only by tone. You can tell them apart when they're "spelled" with the correct characters....the Chinese characters for Shanxi and Shaanxi are 山西 and 陕西....but I digress....
Time for a caffeine refill....while I am gone, read "Beijing Jeep", an account of the early lunacy regarding one American car company's foray into building stuff in China...there will not be a quiz, as the answers to the questions raised this morning are easily guessed.
Most of this I don’t disagree with, but the bit about the Chinese government and its role—I think you would agree it is more complicated. Nothing that I say is to suggest I’ve got anything in the way of experience, personal or otherwise, to compete with yours dealing directly with the country or people.
From my understanding, it is fairly well known that the Chinese government, the CCP as we usually say, has outright encouraged IP theft from abroad (under the aim of finding shortcuts to high-tech military equipment, mostly) and made it a law that such activities are kept secret from foreigners.
I think you would also agree that the CCP has permitted higher levels of pollution than the urbanizing population would tolerate if it had a voice. A lot of the protests so carefully hidden from view of outsiders has to do with poor air and water quality.
There’s a lot that could be said of the state-owned enterprises and their overproduction using environmentally destructive methods and convict/slave labor. There are issues of government abuse of minorities, of prisoners of conscience/political prisoners. There’s a lot more going on than meets the eye, and some of it still manages to get reported outside the country.
I could go on, but I need to get some other stuff done. I think you get the gist: the Sinophobia here can run to excess, often showing little respect to the nation and its people. On the other hand, the government of the PRC is not due the same sort of respect or admiration. It has a very dark and sinister past that far exceeds most of American experience and history. The books of Frank Dikötter, for one, have done a lot to illuminate the matter.
Everyone should read Dikotter. Everything he's written. Man, I would love to have this conversation in person. You're right, but on a couple topics, you're not right. I don't think Dikotter gets the Party entirely. It is not the unitary monolithic entity as it's always portrayed here. There are more factions than I am going to describe. Any more on this topic and it would require a dissertation or an all day conversation. It's amazingly complicated. All the stuff winged at China, I can rebut with endless "whatabouts" in our own sordid mess of certain government action through history. It's not a tidy story.
There’s a lot to take in, especially for someone like me, who only has a basic understanding of the economy in the first place. I go back and forth over China. I do worry about their government, however.
Good explanation and history. A simplistic view of mine is that China is much better than the US at playing the long game. That's probably due in large part to our political system changing leadership on a regular basis, which magnifies our short attention span as we change priorities rapidly. Wish I knew the answer to that.
"The fall of America as a manufacturing powerhouse is a tragedy of errors where myopic corporate leadership, timid financing, oligopolistic complacency and policy chaos allowed the US and Europe to neglect their own industries. That left a yawning gap that was filled by Chinese start-ups, sprouting like saplings in a forest clearing. If rich democracies are playing to win the clean energy and every other manufacturing revolution, they need to learn the lessons of what went wrong, rather than just comfort themselves with fairy tales about those evil Chinese. And, what went wrong is very simple. It was us."
I admire this paragraph very much, including the forest succession simile. One of the best things about this explanation is that, like MarqueG's conclusion (and my own view), it puts the agency for making things better where it belongs: on us.
Lately I’ve been very wary of goods manufactured in China. My SIL made a “bags” game board and ordered a set of bags, most likely made in China. Every time you tossed one and it hit the board,a plume of white powder came out of the bag and I thought, “it’s probably a chemical designed to kill us.”
There are certain brands I won't buy because of their reputation for poor quality. There's good Chinese manufacturing, then there is "Knockoff U". My guess is good American companies seek to lower costs by producing in China, but want to ensure quality. The bad ones just want low cost.
As a rule of thumb, if it is at Wal-Mart and you have never heard of it, it's likely from "Knockoff U".
I frequent the Wuhan iteration of the consumer temple of the universe, Sam's Club. It is a testament to the American ideal of abundance for The People. The place is absolutely packed with Chinese seeing what abundance means and they like it. And, not surprisingly, there are products from all over the world, not just China.
The greeter is not a dour old person who know they have failed in life. The greeters are smiling exuberant young Chinese literally bubbling with good will. The people working the aisles are unbelievably excited about helping customers. It's so positively American, I find myself giggling at the spectacle.
I’ve got a range of complaints and practices in a similar vein. I won’t buy seafood if it says “Made in China” because—to my knowledge—the country still permits very aggressive/destructive fishing practices. Also, fish is one of the supermarket foods that is frequently counterfeited, with cheaper substitutes intentionally mislabeled.
One of my longstanding gripes with Amazon is that they intentionally stopped displaying “country of origin” on products in their descriptions several years ago so customers wouldn’t be able to choose based on that criterion. Amazon doesn’t do much in the way of producer screening, and some of the tech products in the past have been overt knock-offs of branded items where part of the price is justified because the brand name *does* perform quality control because their brand is at stake. In some instances, the knock-off products look suspiciously like they rely on outright IP theft.
Some of the user reviews on Amazon, though, will occasionally warn of poor manufacturing quality, documented with pictures and video.
In a lot of ways, as Western consumers, we’re used to being coddled by government agencies and quangos that do consumer product safety and/or product approval, or class-action law firms that beat the laggards into better behavior or out of existence. Like other developing country governments, the Chinese government doesn’t do that sort of QC.
I’ve started noticing that on some of Amazon’s products, right under the description, it will say something about this article having high returns. Also, even name brands seem to be made in China or somewhere else. It’s very hard to find something that is made strictly in the USA.
I should probably have made it clearer that it isn’t only about made in China. It’s about established brands that have customer service and a brand reputation that they care about. There probably will be and are Chinese brands that are using that approach—it’s just that I don’t know them yet.
A lot of the Chinese brands I see on Amazon are completely foreign to me, and based on the user reviews, quite a few have questionable quality and after-sales service. From those will arise the future Volkswagens and Sonys and Samsungs.
Some of the products out of China are definitely junk. I’ve had my share of stuff that didn’t work or didn’t last, and fortunately, Amazon makes it easy to return stuff. I had an interesting experience with some inkjet cartridges that didn’t fit my printer, even though mine was listed as compatible. I returned them, and gave them a bad review. The retailer would not leave me alone, and she seemed determined to get a good review. She kept offering me a replacement, and I could keep the ones I had. I kept telling her I didn’t want them because they didn’t fit my printer. This went on for weeks, and I think I finally reported her to Amazon. Some other stuff is fine.
Of course there are products of inferior quality. If we're cherry picking, we'll be here a long time trading offenses. If we're trading shots on who builds stuff better, in aggregate, I'd place my bets on the Chinese. Sorry to say it, but get used to it because it's already here.
Re: the fishing thing....THAT is a legitimate complaint. They are destroying whatever is left of fish stocks throughout all of the Pacific. Chinese like fish. They like fish a lot. They're doing whatever is necessary to fill the demand for fish. It is an ongoing tragedy that's going to end badly with the literal extermination of all fish, exactly the same as what we did to the amazing fisheries of the Great Lakes Basin, which most folks have never even heard of because by time there were information networks that might alert folks to the decimation of fish stocks, and in the very unlikely event of governmental restrictions on fishing, the fish were already gone. Even if folks had known, we wouldn't have done anything to stop it because that would have meant folks went hungry and very large numbers of new settlers in the NW territories wouldn't have a job.
So, once again, what we are seeing in China in almost every imaginable iteration of human activity, we already did over a century ago and have since memory holed it.
I have heard gripes about cheap Chinese steel for decades. I maintain that if quality is the problem it is not the fault of the Chinese. They make what the customer specifies.
Not accurate, but the thought is right. Chinese are doing what we do, i.e., enacting policy and doing what keeps folks occupied and earning income. If they slow down production, millions will be out of a job.
I could argue this from a number of perspectives, all ending in the same general situation. We (humans) achieved the ability to manufacture whatever we need in quantities that utterly outstrip all ability to consume or utilize what's been manufactured.
IOW, what're we going to do as civilizations? Answers are elusive.
I'm not sure I follow. My point was that if an American company (or other nationality) contracts with a Chinese company to manufacture something, the contract includes quality control standards. If the product doesn't meet those standards, the Chinese manufacturer is libel.
Unless, of course, the economics are such that nobody else is going to make the desired quality product at the rate the contractor is willing to pay.
If the quality is not up to snuff, it is not necessarily an indication of inferior knowledge or skill of the manufacturer's culture. It may be a symptom of poor communication between company cultures or good old fashioned market conditions. Playing the victim ("Yeah, they made crappy stuff for us - whatcha gonna do?") doesn't make any sense.
I should have noted earlier that the griping had more to do with national pride than any experience in manufacturing.
It's a remarkably dense and obscure topic. Supply chains are stretched across hemispheres, assembled in wherever it's determined to be most advantageous, and in the complications anything can happen....like some specific product not being up to snuff. It happens. In aggregate, I have been there, seen it, and it is frighteningly superb. Anyone still making blanket comments about Chinese products being substandard, OK. Everyone is allowed their opinion. But, judging via Amazon returns and/or ratings on websites does NOT provide any appreciable picture of what's actually happening. When I see what's happened in just the last 5-7 years in auto mfg., it is mind blowing. Their stuff is good. Really good.
Many situations are framed as a "good guys vs bad guys" story, when it's really the give and take of life.
It's like with wildlife documentaries. When you're watching the penguin documentary, you root for the cute penguins against the mean seals that eat them. When you watch the seal documentary, you root for the seals that eat penguins.
Same with cheetahs and antelope, etc. Nature is where stuff eats other stuff, including you.
We live in nature, and we have not figured out how to stop eating each other. I've heard about a few folks throughout history that tried to educate us on how to be with our other fellow humans. They got eaten, their beautiful ideas sublimated into idiotic formulations of activity called religion. I tend to avoid religion for that reason.
Good morning. Prayers to all in Milton’s path. Hopefully they are elsewhere.
The mothership this morning is celebrating its fifth anniversary, and featuring a story examining whether noncitizens really are voting in American elections, as Donald Trump and some of his followers alleged. Meanwhile, the FP is headlining a story about fallout at CBS, after a reporter interviewing DEI icon Ta-Niesi Coates, asked him tough but routine questions and was reprimanded for it — that is, for good journalism.
I hope she didn't know better at the time. Given how some states conduct registrations (election day, maybe minimal documentation/instruction) I'm not greatly surprised.
The Commentary Magazine podcast was talking about this yesterday. "He committed a journalism!"
It would be interesting if Mr. Steve Hayes and, perhaps, Mr. David French - on record as viewing Ta-Nehisi Coates positively - were to address the profound degradation of their journalistical industry that is shockingly exemplified by this situation.
I get the impression that, for one faction at CBS News at least, the journalistical principle is, "Ta-Nehisi Coates is a Black progressive radical. The only appropriate stance for a non-Black interviewer is reverent, cringing gratitude for being allowed in Coates's presence and, 'Please forgive me for existing.' "
Interesting ideas. I agree with the conclusion that, while the U.S. hasn't much influence on what China does, we could do a lot to remove obstacles to businesses and workers in the United States.
A tangential point is that we could do a lot to remove obstacles to trade with friendly nations. If, arguendo, China is a unique national security threat, wouldn't it make sense to stop using trade restrictions to bash Canada?
TMD has an item this morning saying that U.S. and European officials are complaining that China is dangerously driving down the price of lithium. "O noes!!!! Don't sell us lithium cheaply - we want to pay much, much more!!!!" said no normal person ever.
The argument is that low prices will keep the U.S. (or Europe) from developing lithium supply, and then we're in a pinch if/when China either raises the price or restricts supply. Okay, we see the potential problem. Are we just going to sit here on our zygodactyls, whining, or are we going to take sensible actions based on the perceived risk?
One good thing about all this is that there can't be much - if any - environmental downside in the area where this is happening, since the Salton Sea is environmental cf already. However, the effect of producing and using untold numbers of all manner of lithium batteries and then having to recycle or dispose of them in the future...
Aw hell, we don't see the disposal of spent nuclear fuel and other radioactive waste as a serious enough problem to do anything in the way of a comprehensive, effective long-term solution, so how much environmental trouble could a few worn out toxic batteries cause?
And "obstacles to businesses" is not shorthand for "permission to pollute an abuse employees."
Maybe we could consider the possibility that we could achieve the same goals more efficiently. Maybe goals are included that are no longer relevant. Because we know it is so much easier to amend regulations than it is to re-write them.
Maybe there could be a regulation that allows streamlining without opening everything up to be reconsidered. Maybe it already exists.
** And "obstacles to businesses" is not shorthand for "permission to pollute and abuse employees." **
No, although there are definitions involved. Nothing can be done without pollution, including my driving to Walmart. (Or even breathing out ...). Cost-benefit tradeoffs: they get more complex when we're dealing with something like lithium mining or power plants or manufacturing facilities.
There are tradeoffs between employees and employment, between employees and "the job." How much protection of employees is consistent with survival of the business? One of my complaints - having lived through it with my adult children - is the difficulty of scheduling employees in many businesses, including retail and food service. It's hard to have any life other than video games if you never know when you'll be working.
In summary, I agree that some obstacles will remain, even with the best management of the relevant interests.
My son just bought a new Tesla 3 Performance model. I will have to ask him if he knows where it was manufactured. I was slightly sceptical of all-electric vehicles, especially for use where I live in the Appalachians in WV. My son was stationed in Omaha & is in the process of moving to D.C. for his work with the Navy. He was on leave and took my wife and me for several short drives in the mountains. I was very impressed with the power, low battery usage, safety features & extremely low cost of charging. He explained the vehicle pricing & battery longevity, which I found shockingly positive. I still don't think a Tesla would be ideal for us, but I am much more inclined to view them positively now.
OTOH, my son, while a brilliant nuclear engineer, basically sees Musk as able to do no wrong. I don't argue with him, as he can out-argue me on most subjects ;)
I think there will come a time when we go to EVs, but what worries me now is how much heavier they are than gas powered cars. There aren’t that many on the road, by comparison, but apparently you do not want to get hit by one. And then there has been a problem with batteries catching on fire. Right now my husband and I have a hybrid, and that seems like a more logical way to go in the meantime, but glad your son is enjoying his car!
Being the big Elon Musk fan that my son is, he told me that Elon mandated to his engineering department they have 0% safety failures in Teslas. I don't remember the exact details, perhaps someone here knows, but my son can quote chapter and verse of Elon's engineering dictates, being an engineer himself. Being a Navy nuclear engineer, he often waxes eloquent on the Navy's 100% submarine nuclear safety record. So maybe such a thing is achievable, though I find it hard to believe.
I will say that his Tesla handily avoided a collision with a deer with 3 occupants inside at night. Something that I cannot achieve in any of my vehicles, especially at night. We often have dozens of deer crossing the roads during a 30 minute drive, especially this time of year. I was impressed with how fast the Tesla stopped.
We have lots of deer in Wisconsin, and I’m always worried about hitting one. I feel bad about hitting anything, but they are big enough to do a lot of damage. There are definitely some plusses when it comes to EVs.
My other son has a hybrid SUV, which he loves. He gets amazing mpg from the gas engine. Some of my friends here in the mountains have hybrids and they seem to like them a lot.
I wish the government would put more emphasis on hybrids for now. They do get great mileage, and it’s nice to not have to worry about charging the battery.
Perhaps you should be prepared to hold on to him for a while? Might take some time for his family to sell enough of those doors he has so much tied up in to raise the dough. That's assuming they want him back...
Morning! I imagine the facilities in and around the Villages are fairly new and built to higher hurricane-proof standards. Still, fingers crossed. I promises to be a big mess.
The Villages is too far from the coast to worry about storm surge, but they can get high winds, heavy rains, tornadoes. The corporate residences like the condo building where Mom lived until a couple of months ago and the assisted living building where she lives now are built to withstand anything, and they have generators and emergency supplies.
Looking at a webcam someone setup of several beachfront views in SW Florida, in Milton's path, has me wondering:
Where are those space lasers when you really need them?
is the JSLC asleep at the wheel? 🙂
I don't know why Biden doesn't use the Presidential Weather Map Sharpie inherited from the Trump administration to deal with this.
When I was a kid, "Made in Japan" was still a negative. But the Japanese got good at making quality products, to the point where (starting in the 1970s) their cars were better than ours.
My experience with stuff made in China--it varies. But I have learned to take a pass on stuff I'm considering buying on Amazon if a) it isn't going to arrive until about 6 weeks from now; b) it has a brand name that's even more random-sounding than the ones assigned to American pharmauceuticals; c) there's anything unclear or inconsistent about the description; d) it involves socks, because they're always going to be too small no matter what size you go with.
I had a 1972 Honda 600 coupe. the 600 was the engine size (or you might say, a 0.6L engine). About 36 horsepower. 10 inch rims. top seed 58mph (interstate speed limit then was 55). I used a brick as the cruise control. The former owner cut the roof off, made it a convertible. He was a house painter so he put stands on the bumper, so he could haul ladders with it.
Loads of fun! I drove it three years before the engine died.
My take. Hopefully not irritating my well informed Sino expert, Kurt.
I first traveled to Shanghai in 1983. Gave a seminar on plastics in the Automotive and other applications. 50 old school slides (a color Marketing slide cost $100 to $300 ea, handmade then). The bulb burnt out. No replacement.
So, in hot steamy July, with 1930s iron based desks and a slow moving fan to circulate the open windowed room, at the Shanghai Institute of Technology, 50 PhD from Beijing and Shanghai watched me scrawl a chalk over slate blackboard for 6 hours. A few good questions.
In that era, the view of BigCorp, which had invested in (ie gave, not took) a couple plants in Shanghai, was China could do theory but not engineering production. That changed!!
I walked along the Bund, river parks across from the old Peace Hotel. White short sleeved shirts. Everyone. I was a proud American. Assuaging fears about Reagan and the US. Fabulous.
Driving in Shanghai in1983, on Stalinist boulevards and buildings, it dawned on me. One car every 5 minutes. But bicycles!!! 10 across, 100 deep going both directions. I said to my English speaking driver, you have many bicycles! He said yes. We make about about ---- 300 million bikes a year, with earned pride.
I realized then, that Manufacturing in China was only a when, not if question.
I did not approve and still don't of the "Lets free trade everything". China is an asymmetrical power player. The American paradigm of quarterly results to drive short term game, is easy easy prey for long term players. The Chinese culture is very long term. I would not have allowed Walmart to evolve into ChinaMart. It was unwatched, unexpected. Like a tea kettle with no whistle. Uncontrolled systems fail. They end up pushing to extremes.
But Clinton and Bush didnt care. Business at large wanted lower cost more profits.
The Business advantage of China, is in fact its China Industrial policy. It's ability to manipulate American business.
My final take, is, we exported 20 million jobs, a million small businesses (remember the local hardware, clothing stores?), and a chunk of middle class - with the diminishing benefit of creating that middle class in China. Which is some brake on a China invasion of Taiwan and Nuclear war.
Nothing irritates me. If people read what I write and conclude I am pro-China, anti-America, vice versa, or whatever, they're not reading what I wrote.
Your take is accurate. "We" created our current problem due to forces most publications do nothing to examine or explain. "We" imagined we'd be going in with an army of MBA's to do the management and the Chinese would gladly and willingly be supplicants to our imagined superiority in business management and execution. Nope.
Our policy, if one can apply the term here, was based in complete and utter ignorance of the world and in overwhelming hubris. We turned loose powers that we imagined we controlled. Wrong.
The next mess will be when China's service industries overtake our own. Who here has read about or even knows the PwC mess created by what were very obvious and extremely lousy accounting and auditing practices in the collapse of Evergrande? We helped blow up the Chinese housing market in the same manner that our players were complicit in creating our housing market collapse in '08.
I don’t read you as being “pro-China” or “anti-America”, just trying to get people to be fairer in their assessments rather than knee-jerk anti-China. Which itself is a pretty American trait: encouraging fairness.
Thank you. The narratives from our side are not connected to reality. Interestingly, the narratives from the other side...not the top level propagandistic proclamation stuff but the multitudes of highly intelligent policy papers from their top academics and policy people...are remarkably insightful. Put another way, if folks are getting their information from the NYT or WSJ...highly biased idiotic reporting of selected specifics...then folks have no connection to what's going on.
Great conversation, as I’ve already said.
Morning, Doug. I think it's interesting to have different perspectives.
His perspective is not different. It is the same as mine. I just describe events and social conditions differently. I have learned that to talk about China in anything other than criticisms and popular American media perspectives, folks imagine I'm cheerleading for China.
If anything, my time in China has informed me how American viewpoints develop, which in simple terms is idiotic decontextualized nonsense.
Okay, shows what my reading comprehension is doing!
I have few dreams, one of them being the hope that old men will stop creating diversions leading to wars that young men die in. I am a globalist to the core, which means understanding what the world is and acting accordingly. So far, America is not acting intelligently, let alone accordingly.
It seems that no matter how much we create and innovate to get more competitive, we'll always be at a huge disadvantage due to the reality that there are possibly billions of Chinese people willing to work for a small fraction of what America workers can make. Combine that with the government being willing to do anything necessary financially or otherwise to ensure the success of their industries, and it's a bleak picture for anyone trying to compete. But China is facing serius headwinds, primarily demographic ones, as their population ages and needs to be cared for by a shrinking worker base. Can the government just print money to keep afloat? Time will tell.
Yep.
Lost in the discussion is American's complete misunderstanding (ignorance) of what life in China is like. It's hard. Harder than any description I could provide would elucidate. All my friends grew up in mud huts with dirt floors, working 18-20 hour days 7 days a week knee deep in rice paddies fertilized with their own shit for something less than pennies.
Working a factory line, any line in any condition, is vastly preferable to peasant farming, which up until just a few decades ago is what 95%+ of all Chinese did to survive. We can't, and aren't, going to be able to compete in manufacturing. All the silly talk over here ignores where this is going. They care about US and the Euros business, but they care more about emerging markets, which they happen to be in geographic center of.
This morning's mashup reminds me of Gramsci’s famous line about the interregnum...
"The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying but the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear."
Sounds familiar.
Things are always in flux, as I'll write in an article later this week. When you're in the middle of it, you can't see either the present or the future very clearly.
Yes, I always think about how factories lured so many people away from farming. Somehow, we adjusted, because we still have plenty of farms.
For something completely different, I'm trying to get the new Finance Council chairman at my church to answer two questions, each answerable with a "yes" or "no."
The good news is he answered my email, which the previous chairwoman would never have done. The bad news is he didn't know the answer: he had to ask the Business Manager, who is also new. The good news is that building fund contributions are firmly sequestered from the parish general fund. The bad news is they don't seem to be able to answer the "flip side" question, "Are funds from the general collection going to the building debt?"
As a twist, Jim My Fixer called and explained that the answer is, "Yes, but it's temporary," and also that he thinks the new business manager and Finance Council chairman are okay, but they were left with a mess by their predecessors, and they were also left with deep reservoirs of distrust and personal animus that it's not really fair to dump on them. Yet.
I'm now waiting to see whether the Financial Council will be able to find out from the business manager what Jim already told me. As a side note, people's reading comprehension is really lacking. I feel obnoxious repeating my questions and explaining that the answer will be either "yes" or "no," but otherwise, I'll just get inconclusive and irrelevant roundaboutation.
This reminds me a little of what went on in my small condo association after The B----h sold her unit and departed the board. Fortunately most people understood the situation, and even more fortunately, the new president and others made a deliberate effort to signal a new era of openness and fairness and neighborliness. The messes were not cleaned up overnight, but the contrast with the old ways was encouraging.
Sometimes I think about eventually moving to a condo. Then our friends tell us some of the hassles involving the association, not to mention the neighbors!
A difference is that our new people aren't making any deliberate efforts. It's possible, Jim says, that they don't know how deeply and deservedly their predecessors were detested.
Katie is on vacation this week. She is sleeping in, sewing, just relaxing. 😀
We drove to Jasper for the weekend, and visited with my family. Lynn let her kids prep the food for the birthday party and...we have leftovers. At lunch the next day we had, leftovers. I joked that in some versions of the bible, it reads "the little boy with his loaves of bread and fishes, plus whatever the Janney family brought". We came home with 3 dozen cupcakes, I'll take them to school for students to eat....
The highlight was staying at a Holiday Inn Express with the automatic pancake maker. You push a button, and can watch your pancake flow along the assembly line. Within a minute two pancakes fall off the rollers! I want one, Katie is afraid the dogs would learn to push the button and feed themselves.
I actually looked up the cost: $3,800. I cannot justify that amount.... doggone it! 😢
Could the dogs not be trained to make pancakes for everyone? ;)
One of my earliest literary fascinations was the book "Homer Price and the Donut Machine", a classic by Robert McCloskey, a wonderful story of youthful exuberance gone awry in trying to mechanize his Uncle's (I think it was his uncle...memory is fuzzy) coffee shop donut operation. There was some amount of The Sorcerer's Apprentice to the tale.
I've seen those pancake makers at hotels, too. It's one of the things all the students love when we go to State Envirothon.
Some of those hotel breakfast bars are absolutely awful. I’ve never seen a pancake maker.
The Holiday Inn Express (Jasper) is above average. It's free, so the food is not gourmet, but it is fresh and clean.
The pancake maker is about 2 ft by 1 ft, and it has rollers in it. the pancake batter drops in, it moves along the conveyor belt, and when it is done it rolls onto a waiting plate. Or, if you're a dog, onto the floor. You buy giant bags of batter, load the bag in, and something squeezes batter onto the conveyor system.
I can picture the dogs!! 😂 It’s interesting how a hotel chain can vary so much. I remember staying with my mom at some old chain I hadn’t seen in years, and it was so nice. Most of them don’t seem to be very well maintained, and I have a feeling they don’t use “quality” anything. I remember one place where the microwave was filthy, and people were still using it! 🤢
My only personal experience of Chinese competition shutting down US industries is with a friend who owned a wood crafts parts manufacturing company in our economically depressed area of WV. He was one of the few remaining companies providing employment in our area. He explained to me how it was cheaper for Michaels, etc to buy & ship their wood craft kits from China than buy from him, even with the very low wages in our area. He went out of business shortly thereafter. It devastated his family as well as being just one more step in the continued closure of all major employers in our area.
I am still a free-trader, but I can see the errors being committed by our political leadership, as outlined in the article today.
Meanwhile, here in the southern part of the state, the coal industry was running like gangbusters until about 2008, when the Obama administration entered the scene by canceling a whole fleet of mining permits, strangling the regional economy for the next several years.
Coal is still in global high demand, but the federal government has done everything in its powers when in D-party control to prevent mining—as well as burning any fossil fuels at all. They keep shuttering coal-fired power plants, driving up electricity costs (you should see what the electric companies are requesting from PSCs), and chasing energy intensive manufacturing to countries like China where they do whatever they can to make electricity cheap and abundant.
The coal mining industries recovered here, but they didn’t bounce back to boom-time employment and production levels. People moved away—and continue to do so.
Also, as a WV resident, you’ve probably heard the back-and-forth about the gypsum wallboard factories along the Ohio. That’s another business where its’ cheaper to import from Chinese factories than produce locally—arguably thanks to laxer eco regulations than American communities would ever tolerate.
I might have to delete my remark about copying Kurt’s response, because I would like to link to this article. We’ve been striking up some excellent conversations here, and it’s nice to be able to do so without having anyone go off the deep end!
Also, as a WV resident!!! Wow. Shock
I did not know. I grew up in Wood County and had an 80ac farm in Greenbrier County. Most of friends, like I, went out of state college. A couple came back for WVU medical school and law school.
As a start to what might go on for a while...depending on too many contingencies to list...I have this observation....
Washington blames China’s dominance of the solar industry and rapidly advancing state of the art manufacturing of literally EVERYTHING on what are routinely dubbed “unfair trade practices". That’s just a comforting myth.
China’s edge doesn’t come from a conspiratorial plot hatched by an authoritarian government. It hasn’t been driven by state-owned manufacturers, subsidized loans to factories, tariffs on imported modules or theft of foreign technological expertise. Instead, it’s come from private businesses convinced of a bright future, investing aggressively and luring global talent to a booming industry — exactly the entrepreneurial mix that made the US an industrial powerhouse.
I have never experienced a citizenship that is more hardwired for entrepreneurial capitalistic activity than Chinese. The Chinese miracle of the last 40 years is very simple. When the government took its boot off the necks of the Chinese population, the joint exploded with characteristic capitalistic fervor.
The fall of America as a manufacturing powerhouse is a tragedy of errors where myopic corporate leadership, timid financing, oligopolistic complacency and policy chaos allowed the US and Europe to neglect their own industries. That left a yawning gap that was filled by Chinese start-ups, sprouting like saplings in a forest clearing. If rich democracies are playing to win the clean energy and every other manufacturing revolution, they need to learn the lessons of what went wrong, rather than just comfort themselves with fairy tales about those evil Chinese. And, what went wrong is very simple. It was us.
Chinese are really good at this stuff. They've been really good at it since well before the Tang Dynasty which was roughly around 600-900 CE, i.e., 1500-ish years. By the time of the Tang, they were shipping over a million pieces of porcelain all over their known world (caliphates in the Middle East, the African Kingdoms, the ASEAN, the Stans, etc.) in stunningly well developed manufacturing and distribution systems extending from Jingdezhen in central Jianxi and down through man made canals and waterways through to Guangdong and (then) Canton. They also developed what we would now call international banking over a millennium ago. They were very good at that too, and kept vast money reserves in the walled city of Pingyao up in Shanxi...or Shaanxi....I forget which one it is and yes, they have two provinces whose pronunciations are differentiated only by tone. You can tell them apart when they're "spelled" with the correct characters....the Chinese characters for Shanxi and Shaanxi are 山西 and 陕西....but I digress....
Time for a caffeine refill....while I am gone, read "Beijing Jeep", an account of the early lunacy regarding one American car company's foray into building stuff in China...there will not be a quiz, as the answers to the questions raised this morning are easily guessed.
Most of this I don’t disagree with, but the bit about the Chinese government and its role—I think you would agree it is more complicated. Nothing that I say is to suggest I’ve got anything in the way of experience, personal or otherwise, to compete with yours dealing directly with the country or people.
From my understanding, it is fairly well known that the Chinese government, the CCP as we usually say, has outright encouraged IP theft from abroad (under the aim of finding shortcuts to high-tech military equipment, mostly) and made it a law that such activities are kept secret from foreigners.
I think you would also agree that the CCP has permitted higher levels of pollution than the urbanizing population would tolerate if it had a voice. A lot of the protests so carefully hidden from view of outsiders has to do with poor air and water quality.
There’s a lot that could be said of the state-owned enterprises and their overproduction using environmentally destructive methods and convict/slave labor. There are issues of government abuse of minorities, of prisoners of conscience/political prisoners. There’s a lot more going on than meets the eye, and some of it still manages to get reported outside the country.
I could go on, but I need to get some other stuff done. I think you get the gist: the Sinophobia here can run to excess, often showing little respect to the nation and its people. On the other hand, the government of the PRC is not due the same sort of respect or admiration. It has a very dark and sinister past that far exceeds most of American experience and history. The books of Frank Dikötter, for one, have done a lot to illuminate the matter.
Everyone should read Dikotter. Everything he's written. Man, I would love to have this conversation in person. You're right, but on a couple topics, you're not right. I don't think Dikotter gets the Party entirely. It is not the unitary monolithic entity as it's always portrayed here. There are more factions than I am going to describe. Any more on this topic and it would require a dissertation or an all day conversation. It's amazingly complicated. All the stuff winged at China, I can rebut with endless "whatabouts" in our own sordid mess of certain government action through history. It's not a tidy story.
There’s a lot to take in, especially for someone like me, who only has a basic understanding of the economy in the first place. I go back and forth over China. I do worry about their government, however.
Good explanation and history. A simplistic view of mine is that China is much better than the US at playing the long game. That's probably due in large part to our political system changing leadership on a regular basis, which magnifies our short attention span as we change priorities rapidly. Wish I knew the answer to that.
"The fall of America as a manufacturing powerhouse is a tragedy of errors where myopic corporate leadership, timid financing, oligopolistic complacency and policy chaos allowed the US and Europe to neglect their own industries. That left a yawning gap that was filled by Chinese start-ups, sprouting like saplings in a forest clearing. If rich democracies are playing to win the clean energy and every other manufacturing revolution, they need to learn the lessons of what went wrong, rather than just comfort themselves with fairy tales about those evil Chinese. And, what went wrong is very simple. It was us."
I admire this paragraph very much, including the forest succession simile. One of the best things about this explanation is that, like MarqueG's conclusion (and my own view), it puts the agency for making things better where it belongs: on us.
Yup. Pogo told us this a long time ago. We didn't listen.
"Wherever you go, there you are." In many situations, bad outcomes are the result of sub-optimal decisions.
Lately I’ve been very wary of goods manufactured in China. My SIL made a “bags” game board and ordered a set of bags, most likely made in China. Every time you tossed one and it hit the board,a plume of white powder came out of the bag and I thought, “it’s probably a chemical designed to kill us.”
There are certain brands I won't buy because of their reputation for poor quality. There's good Chinese manufacturing, then there is "Knockoff U". My guess is good American companies seek to lower costs by producing in China, but want to ensure quality. The bad ones just want low cost.
As a rule of thumb, if it is at Wal-Mart and you have never heard of it, it's likely from "Knockoff U".
I frequent the Wuhan iteration of the consumer temple of the universe, Sam's Club. It is a testament to the American ideal of abundance for The People. The place is absolutely packed with Chinese seeing what abundance means and they like it. And, not surprisingly, there are products from all over the world, not just China.
The greeter is not a dour old person who know they have failed in life. The greeters are smiling exuberant young Chinese literally bubbling with good will. The people working the aisles are unbelievably excited about helping customers. It's so positively American, I find myself giggling at the spectacle.
The game is alternatively called “cornhole” because the bags are supposed to be filled with field corn. I’ll have to get him a set “Made in Iowa.”
I’ve got a range of complaints and practices in a similar vein. I won’t buy seafood if it says “Made in China” because—to my knowledge—the country still permits very aggressive/destructive fishing practices. Also, fish is one of the supermarket foods that is frequently counterfeited, with cheaper substitutes intentionally mislabeled.
One of my longstanding gripes with Amazon is that they intentionally stopped displaying “country of origin” on products in their descriptions several years ago so customers wouldn’t be able to choose based on that criterion. Amazon doesn’t do much in the way of producer screening, and some of the tech products in the past have been overt knock-offs of branded items where part of the price is justified because the brand name *does* perform quality control because their brand is at stake. In some instances, the knock-off products look suspiciously like they rely on outright IP theft.
Some of the user reviews on Amazon, though, will occasionally warn of poor manufacturing quality, documented with pictures and video.
In a lot of ways, as Western consumers, we’re used to being coddled by government agencies and quangos that do consumer product safety and/or product approval, or class-action law firms that beat the laggards into better behavior or out of existence. Like other developing country governments, the Chinese government doesn’t do that sort of QC.
I’ve started noticing that on some of Amazon’s products, right under the description, it will say something about this article having high returns. Also, even name brands seem to be made in China or somewhere else. It’s very hard to find something that is made strictly in the USA.
I should probably have made it clearer that it isn’t only about made in China. It’s about established brands that have customer service and a brand reputation that they care about. There probably will be and are Chinese brands that are using that approach—it’s just that I don’t know them yet.
A lot of the Chinese brands I see on Amazon are completely foreign to me, and based on the user reviews, quite a few have questionable quality and after-sales service. From those will arise the future Volkswagens and Sonys and Samsungs.
Some of the products out of China are definitely junk. I’ve had my share of stuff that didn’t work or didn’t last, and fortunately, Amazon makes it easy to return stuff. I had an interesting experience with some inkjet cartridges that didn’t fit my printer, even though mine was listed as compatible. I returned them, and gave them a bad review. The retailer would not leave me alone, and she seemed determined to get a good review. She kept offering me a replacement, and I could keep the ones I had. I kept telling her I didn’t want them because they didn’t fit my printer. This went on for weeks, and I think I finally reported her to Amazon. Some other stuff is fine.
Wrong....(insert klaxon horn sound here)
Of course there are products of inferior quality. If we're cherry picking, we'll be here a long time trading offenses. If we're trading shots on who builds stuff better, in aggregate, I'd place my bets on the Chinese. Sorry to say it, but get used to it because it's already here.
Re: the fishing thing....THAT is a legitimate complaint. They are destroying whatever is left of fish stocks throughout all of the Pacific. Chinese like fish. They like fish a lot. They're doing whatever is necessary to fill the demand for fish. It is an ongoing tragedy that's going to end badly with the literal extermination of all fish, exactly the same as what we did to the amazing fisheries of the Great Lakes Basin, which most folks have never even heard of because by time there were information networks that might alert folks to the decimation of fish stocks, and in the very unlikely event of governmental restrictions on fishing, the fish were already gone. Even if folks had known, we wouldn't have done anything to stop it because that would have meant folks went hungry and very large numbers of new settlers in the NW territories wouldn't have a job.
So, once again, what we are seeing in China in almost every imaginable iteration of human activity, we already did over a century ago and have since memory holed it.
I have heard gripes about cheap Chinese steel for decades. I maintain that if quality is the problem it is not the fault of the Chinese. They make what the customer specifies.
Not accurate, but the thought is right. Chinese are doing what we do, i.e., enacting policy and doing what keeps folks occupied and earning income. If they slow down production, millions will be out of a job.
I could argue this from a number of perspectives, all ending in the same general situation. We (humans) achieved the ability to manufacture whatever we need in quantities that utterly outstrip all ability to consume or utilize what's been manufactured.
IOW, what're we going to do as civilizations? Answers are elusive.
I'm not sure I follow. My point was that if an American company (or other nationality) contracts with a Chinese company to manufacture something, the contract includes quality control standards. If the product doesn't meet those standards, the Chinese manufacturer is libel.
Unless, of course, the economics are such that nobody else is going to make the desired quality product at the rate the contractor is willing to pay.
If the quality is not up to snuff, it is not necessarily an indication of inferior knowledge or skill of the manufacturer's culture. It may be a symptom of poor communication between company cultures or good old fashioned market conditions. Playing the victim ("Yeah, they made crappy stuff for us - whatcha gonna do?") doesn't make any sense.
I should have noted earlier that the griping had more to do with national pride than any experience in manufacturing.
It's a remarkably dense and obscure topic. Supply chains are stretched across hemispheres, assembled in wherever it's determined to be most advantageous, and in the complications anything can happen....like some specific product not being up to snuff. It happens. In aggregate, I have been there, seen it, and it is frighteningly superb. Anyone still making blanket comments about Chinese products being substandard, OK. Everyone is allowed their opinion. But, judging via Amazon returns and/or ratings on websites does NOT provide any appreciable picture of what's actually happening. When I see what's happened in just the last 5-7 years in auto mfg., it is mind blowing. Their stuff is good. Really good.
"we already did over a century ago and have since memory holed it"
Good observation.
Thank you. I'll trade punches all day with anyone arguing that "Chinese" are the bad guys and "we're" the good guys.
We are all humans sharing the same wonderful, awful, tragic, or any other characteristic one might want to list.
Many situations are framed as a "good guys vs bad guys" story, when it's really the give and take of life.
It's like with wildlife documentaries. When you're watching the penguin documentary, you root for the cute penguins against the mean seals that eat them. When you watch the seal documentary, you root for the seals that eat penguins.
Same with cheetahs and antelope, etc. Nature is where stuff eats other stuff, including you.
I like those analogies.
We live in nature, and we have not figured out how to stop eating each other. I've heard about a few folks throughout history that tried to educate us on how to be with our other fellow humans. They got eaten, their beautiful ideas sublimated into idiotic formulations of activity called religion. I tend to avoid religion for that reason.
It's still not working out.
Good morning. Prayers to all in Milton’s path. Hopefully they are elsewhere.
The mothership this morning is celebrating its fifth anniversary, and featuring a story examining whether noncitizens really are voting in American elections, as Donald Trump and some of his followers alleged. Meanwhile, the FP is headlining a story about fallout at CBS, after a reporter interviewing DEI icon Ta-Niesi Coates, asked him tough but routine questions and was reprimanded for it — that is, for good journalism.
Yeah, I saw something on that. It’s frustrating that we complain about sloppy journalism, and then this happens.
I had a noncitizen admit to me she voted in presidential elections when I was doing her taxes (for free!) 😡
I hope she didn't know better at the time. Given how some states conduct registrations (election day, maybe minimal documentation/instruction) I'm not greatly surprised.
I only have the option of “Liked,” but I’m more with you on 😡.
"for good journalism"
The Commentary Magazine podcast was talking about this yesterday. "He committed a journalism!"
It would be interesting if Mr. Steve Hayes and, perhaps, Mr. David French - on record as viewing Ta-Nehisi Coates positively - were to address the profound degradation of their journalistical industry that is shockingly exemplified by this situation.
I get the impression that, for one faction at CBS News at least, the journalistical principle is, "Ta-Nehisi Coates is a Black progressive radical. The only appropriate stance for a non-Black interviewer is reverent, cringing gratitude for being allowed in Coates's presence and, 'Please forgive me for existing.' "
Interesting ideas. I agree with the conclusion that, while the U.S. hasn't much influence on what China does, we could do a lot to remove obstacles to businesses and workers in the United States.
A tangential point is that we could do a lot to remove obstacles to trade with friendly nations. If, arguendo, China is a unique national security threat, wouldn't it make sense to stop using trade restrictions to bash Canada?
TMD has an item this morning saying that U.S. and European officials are complaining that China is dangerously driving down the price of lithium. "O noes!!!! Don't sell us lithium cheaply - we want to pay much, much more!!!!" said no normal person ever.
The argument is that low prices will keep the U.S. (or Europe) from developing lithium supply, and then we're in a pinch if/when China either raises the price or restricts supply. Okay, we see the potential problem. Are we just going to sit here on our zygodactyls, whining, or are we going to take sensible actions based on the perceived risk?
One good thing about all this is that there can't be much - if any - environmental downside in the area where this is happening, since the Salton Sea is environmental cf already. However, the effect of producing and using untold numbers of all manner of lithium batteries and then having to recycle or dispose of them in the future...
Aw hell, we don't see the disposal of spent nuclear fuel and other radioactive waste as a serious enough problem to do anything in the way of a comprehensive, effective long-term solution, so how much environmental trouble could a few worn out toxic batteries cause?
https://www.enr.com/articles/58102-groundbreaking-lithium-extraction-plant-launches-in-california
https://electrifynews.com/news/batteries/the-race-to-extract-lithium-around-the-salton-sea-area/
https://www.energy.gov/eere/articles/celebrating-another-breakthrough-domestic-lithium-production
And "obstacles to businesses" is not shorthand for "permission to pollute an abuse employees."
Maybe we could consider the possibility that we could achieve the same goals more efficiently. Maybe goals are included that are no longer relevant. Because we know it is so much easier to amend regulations than it is to re-write them.
Maybe there could be a regulation that allows streamlining without opening everything up to be reconsidered. Maybe it already exists.
** And "obstacles to businesses" is not shorthand for "permission to pollute and abuse employees." **
No, although there are definitions involved. Nothing can be done without pollution, including my driving to Walmart. (Or even breathing out ...). Cost-benefit tradeoffs: they get more complex when we're dealing with something like lithium mining or power plants or manufacturing facilities.
There are tradeoffs between employees and employment, between employees and "the job." How much protection of employees is consistent with survival of the business? One of my complaints - having lived through it with my adult children - is the difficulty of scheduling employees in many businesses, including retail and food service. It's hard to have any life other than video games if you never know when you'll be working.
In summary, I agree that some obstacles will remain, even with the best management of the relevant interests.
Elon built a car factory in China in less time than the facility could even be permitted in CA.
Not a surprise.
My son just bought a new Tesla 3 Performance model. I will have to ask him if he knows where it was manufactured. I was slightly sceptical of all-electric vehicles, especially for use where I live in the Appalachians in WV. My son was stationed in Omaha & is in the process of moving to D.C. for his work with the Navy. He was on leave and took my wife and me for several short drives in the mountains. I was very impressed with the power, low battery usage, safety features & extremely low cost of charging. He explained the vehicle pricing & battery longevity, which I found shockingly positive. I still don't think a Tesla would be ideal for us, but I am much more inclined to view them positively now.
OTOH, my son, while a brilliant nuclear engineer, basically sees Musk as able to do no wrong. I don't argue with him, as he can out-argue me on most subjects ;)
I think there will come a time when we go to EVs, but what worries me now is how much heavier they are than gas powered cars. There aren’t that many on the road, by comparison, but apparently you do not want to get hit by one. And then there has been a problem with batteries catching on fire. Right now my husband and I have a hybrid, and that seems like a more logical way to go in the meantime, but glad your son is enjoying his car!
Being the big Elon Musk fan that my son is, he told me that Elon mandated to his engineering department they have 0% safety failures in Teslas. I don't remember the exact details, perhaps someone here knows, but my son can quote chapter and verse of Elon's engineering dictates, being an engineer himself. Being a Navy nuclear engineer, he often waxes eloquent on the Navy's 100% submarine nuclear safety record. So maybe such a thing is achievable, though I find it hard to believe.
I will say that his Tesla handily avoided a collision with a deer with 3 occupants inside at night. Something that I cannot achieve in any of my vehicles, especially at night. We often have dozens of deer crossing the roads during a 30 minute drive, especially this time of year. I was impressed with how fast the Tesla stopped.
We have lots of deer in Wisconsin, and I’m always worried about hitting one. I feel bad about hitting anything, but they are big enough to do a lot of damage. There are definitely some plusses when it comes to EVs.
My other son has a hybrid SUV, which he loves. He gets amazing mpg from the gas engine. Some of my friends here in the mountains have hybrids and they seem to like them a lot.
I wish the government would put more emphasis on hybrids for now. They do get great mileage, and it’s nice to not have to worry about charging the battery.
Hope this wasn’t too much concentrated Kurt-bait this morning…
I’m late this morning, and I thought of Kurt, too. If he hasn’t responded already, I hope he will.
That made me laugh... I think it is excellent. I just got up, back after appropriate levels of caffeination are achieved....
The perspective of someone with direct experience of China will be interesting.
No, it wasn't curt; it was long.
Where is Phil?!
We have him. Holding him for ransom.
Perhaps you should be prepared to hold on to him for a while? Might take some time for his family to sell enough of those doors he has so much tied up in to raise the dough. That's assuming they want him back...
Yeah. You’re right about the random; they might be in a jamb.
True. Or the outcome of this could hinge on your tolerance for holding on to the guy in the first place.
You may decide it's not worth it and show him the you-know-what before they can raise the dough.
Then again, knowing him as only family can, that may be exactly what they're counting on.
When it comes to bait, have we achieved mastery though?
That's reely hard to define
You have passed level 1---Phil-baiting. The other levels are much more difficult.
You still have much to learn, grasshopper.
Your reputation is clearly well-earned as a master debater!
Wow! So close to the edge of propriety at this, ahem, family publication.
Well. Maybe it’s not for the von Trapp family.
Good morning. My mom called from under the hurricane to see how we are, which indicates that she is fine.
And we hope she remains that way.
Morning! I imagine the facilities in and around the Villages are fairly new and built to higher hurricane-proof standards. Still, fingers crossed. I promises to be a big mess.
The Villages is too far from the coast to worry about storm surge, but they can get high winds, heavy rains, tornadoes. The corporate residences like the condo building where Mom lived until a couple of months ago and the assisted living building where she lives now are built to withstand anything, and they have generators and emergency supplies.
Axios this morning had a picture of 200 Duke Energy trucks being staged at The Villages.
Planning ahead based on what was learned from previous disasters. What a great idea!