China

Mark-B said:
If you could snap your fingers - You - Right Now - if you could snap your fingers and return all manufacturing plants to the USA.. The economy in the USA, those plants, the businesses coexisting alongside them, would crumble pretty-much starting immediately.

Many people think about "American Manufacturing" in terms of "Back in the day" ... Well.. In Reality ..ToDay ..all those orders the USA used to get from international sources to manufacture stuff back-then (for example), would STILL be heading to China or the Cheapest Source of Stable Manufacturing..

American manufacturing wouldn't get that work.

It's not as simple as saying "Buy American" ..it never has been. The days of American Manufacturing are gone. Those same economic mechanics which allowed that hayday at all, are still in effect tho'.. See China.. See Taiwan, See Japan, See India, Indonesia etc..

The only possible way to get back to that heyday most people think of as the American manufacturing heyday, is, if sources of labor/w/materials supply slowly learn to compete with China or the lowest source for stable/quality manufacturing. And Nobody is gonna want that.

As a country we gotta quit this mindset of 'Ahhhh, yeah... but, Remember Yesteryear!" ..and adapt.

We gotta learn new tricks. Improve, Innovate, Create. As a country we can Lead there.. Ruminating on days gone by.. It doesn't solve a thing.
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I don't think those jobs should or will come back. There will always be someone willing to do it cheaper given the economic disparity around the world.
You are right that newer jobs need to take their place. I think, unfortunately, this happened without there being a plan in place to make a transition. Maybe it'll be better in a couple generations. Maybe something else will happen and we'll be here again. Dunno.
 
fractalz said:
I don't think those jobs should or will come back. There will always be someone willing to do it cheaper given the economic disparity around the world.
You are right that newer jobs need to take their place. I think, unfortunately, this happened without there being a plan in place to make a transition. Maybe it'll be better in a couple generations. Maybe something else will happen and we'll be here again. Dunno.
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...it can only go two ways.. Logical progression means that we adapt. But.. then.. Look at what passes off as "logical" these days.. :0) ...Still! :0) ...We can always count on the utter selfishness of those in charge of holding them keys. And Selfishly, they gotta keep the masses happy to an above average extent or find themselves out of work.

...so.. I guess ..long term? ..there's that. :0)
 
China - 1.43 billion people, U.S. 328.2 million people... China is buying our food companies now (they bought Smithfield Foods). Also, they are educating their people here and have been caught stealing technology...at the same time, they are weaponizing islands. All we're asking for is a "Fair Trade"...somehow, I don't think they're going to honor trade deals when they let COVID loose on the World...
 
First, the government should have a plan and strategy to keep the production in the country. It should never depend on the patriotism of the individuals only.

Secondly, outsourcing to other countries proved so many times to be wrong, due to evident drop in the quality...even already complained in other posts in this forum.

It happened to me several times that I called customer service here in Europe when I was connected to some agents in other countries, barely speaking the language and reading some script in front of them. Like "did you press the red power button?". If I answer "no, the power button is blue", they just jump to the next question from the script. Nice troubleshooting...I quit the call and go google myself.

Just one anectode more, in a company I used to work for before, the management decided to cut the costs and to move a part of accounting to India. In the first year, something went wrong and a team of experts including the head of accounting had to fly over to fix the problem. The costs of their flight was multiple times higher than the planned savings. Hooray for the management decisions and for the outsourcing.
 
China is playing with a different rule book than mid-twentieth century America. We got caught flatfooted and on our heels riding a wave we hoped would never crest.
 
Much of the difficulty seems to be in our consistent addition of rules and bureaucracy to the manufacturing sector, along with our wonderful standard of living. For example, look at the manufacture of multilayered pc boards. We used to manufacture them here in Australia. (Now I make the assumption that at best a locally sourced board would be prohibitively expensive, even if you could find one.)
Here, a manufacturer would need to:
  • pay wages to local staff to support their lifestyle - China pays little.
  • abide by national and regional rules around transport, use, handling, and disposal of chemicals. China doesn’t Appear to.
  • Provide hygienic and suitable accommodations to staff that abide by all regulations.
  • Defend themselves against the constantly aggrieved protesters complaining about anything and everything. China doesn’t Have to as protesters are effectively ignored or worse.
  • abide by intellectual property, patent, and copyright laws. China doesn’t - compare their fight jets to the russian ones they purchased to copy.
All this stuff adds up, and basically paralyses anyone thinking of manufacturing locally. Great way to take over the world eh.

thanks
pauly
 
Hey, @FractalAudio,
FractalAudio said:
I'd love to, but there simply aren't any companies left here. All the factories are gone. The last PCB manufacturer closed years ago.

I'm not a proponent of outsourcing but it's a necessary evil. If you don't outsource your price will not be competitive and you will fail as a company. Once the first company went overseas and gained an advantage everyone had to follow suit or perish.
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I understand completely, vis-a-vis the lack of PCB, etc. manufacturing in the U.S.A., specifically.

I'm curious, though, about other non-U.S. alternatives to the LCSSA ...that is to say, to the Larger Communist Slave-State of Asia. (The Kim regime rules the SCSSA, the Smaller Communist Slave-State.)

Are there any decent electronics-manufacturing hubs in the ROC (Taiwan), Vietnam, Malaysia, etc.? Or, heck, Brazil, South Africa, or anywhere else? Or did LCSSA manage to crush them all out of existence (or before they could start) and become the monopoly manufacturer?

I'm not asking whether it's practical for you to move your manufacturing, y'know, tomorrow.

I'm just curious whether, after another 5-10 years of concerted effort to decouple the world economy from the kind of pricks that load Uighurs blindfolded onto cargo trains to ship them off to manufacturing-camps to make masks (yes, for those who haven't seen the news, that's a real thing), is it plausible that other countries could pick up a large part of the slack, even if not in the U.S.?

Or is electronics manufacturing utterly nonexistent except under the red flag? (Seems like a big honkin' oversight by every other country on the planet, if so!)
 
darrenw5094 said:
Kemper? What country?
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Kemper GmbH - Germany, but don't know where everything is manufactured.

"The information provided on this site is subject to change without notice. KEMPER™, PROFILER™, PROFILE™, PROFILING™, PROFILER PowerHead™, PROFILER PowerRack™, PROFILER Remote™, PROFILER Stage™, KEMPER Kabinet™, KEMPER Kone™, KEMPER Rig Exchange™, KEMPER Rig Manager™, Pure Cabinet™ and CabDriver™ are trademarks of Kemper GmbH.
All other product names and company names used on this webpage are (registered) brand names or trademarks of each respective holders, and Kemper GmbH is not necesserily associated or affiliated with them. These product names are used solely for the purpose of identifying the specific products that were used during PROFILING™. All samples and demos may be downloaded but are restricted to personal use and non-profit.
All rights reserved. Copyright ©2020 Kemper GmbH."
 
@Dr. Dipwad, you paint a grim (if realistic) picture, and I wonder if humans simply cannot stop taking advantage of each other (and worse) to survive or thrive.
 
fractalz said:
I recall "Made In Japan" meaning superior quality. Sony electronics products ruled and Japanese cars were cheap and reliable. No one seemed to be complaining about the inexpensive consumer electronics then. Everyone had a Walkman, for example.
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I remember the transition from MIJ meaning cheap crap to meaning stuff made well at a slightly lower price. You must be in your 40s, I am guessing, if you missed that transition....
 
yyz67 said:
@Dr. Dipwad, you paint a grim (if realistic) picture, and I wonder if humans simply cannot stop taking advantage of each other (and worse) to survive or thrive.
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Unfortunately, those people seem to be well into in the "take advantage" and "amass as much wealth as possible" stage much more than simply "survive or thrive" ;-(
 
Whats the point of this? Who gives a shit that it is made in China, the R&D, QA and QC are what matters. I'd rather have Fractal as an option to buy, rather than another failed music company.
 
yyz67 said:
@Dr. Dipwad, you paint a grim (if realistic) picture, and I wonder if humans simply cannot stop taking advantage of each other (and worse) to survive or thrive.
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Well, across all times and places in history until relatively recently, that has been the norm. Institutionalized chattel slavery, that vile thing, is commonly found in (so far as I know) every major civilization on every continent throughout all of human history until the last few hundred years. Only in that recent window-of-time did moral stances against the practice, usually derived (either directly by strict logic, or more often indirectly by emotional associations) from the Judeo-Christian "Imago Dei" doctrine, finally jell into attempts to end it.

Given its historical ubiquity, the shocking thing is that we actually succeeded in formally/publicly outlawing it. Of course, human trafficking (a lot of it) is ongoing in the shadows, but few earlier civilizations even bothered trying to outlaw it, or even limit its cruelty. Sometimes it became less economic and more a matter of breeding: A caste system. Either way, the notion of attempting to institute "liberty and justice for all" (however imperfectly) makes our era a historical outlier. Are we, God forbid, a short-lived outlier, an intermission? Let's hope not....

And if you think that's grim, consider how very few of us, if born into those other times and places, would have stood up against it. Most of us -- again, raised in a society where such things were the norm -- wouldn't have grasped why it was bad. Of those who did, very few would risk anything much to raise objections against it. Tough thing to face.

I'm certainly no better than anyone else. It's easy for me, living where I do and raised the way I was, to get a bit mouthy and describe the PRC as the LCSSA, just because I recently read a news report about the Uighurs and it made me grit my teeth. But me feeling outrage about that is cheap imitation virtue. The person with real virtue is the ethnic Han Chinese person who's hiding a Uighur family in his basement knowing that he and all his relatives could suddenly become organ donors if caught.

Man, I'm all sweetness and light this evening, eh? :confused:

Still, we're not robots. We're free-willed moral agents. Each of us can, every day, go a little outside his comfort zone to treat another person -- even if it's merely an annoying great uncle -- with greater care and dignity than we'd have otherwise done if we'd exerted zero effort.

That's a pretty low-grade form of moral heroism. But most of us aren't particularly high-grade moral heroes (at least, I'm not; sorry if I'm projecting). Perhaps it makes sense to start small.

So, seeing that I'm currently not in a position to become a martyr trying to rescue persecuted ethnic groups, my best bet for tonight is just to not be crabby with my wife and children. If I get better at that, maybe (by the grace of God) I'll have the balls to do something tougher, should the opportunity arise.

I dunno if that's exactly a reply to what you said, @yyz67. But there it is, for what it's worth.
 
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