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Hardware Manufacturing in China's 'Hot Zone'
solferino writes "'Anything you can make for $100, we can make for $40,' Chen says, summing up his commercial philosophy.
An interesting profile in Wired magazine of the computer hardware manufacturing 'hot zone', situated around the pearl river delta in mainland china, just outside Hong Kong.
The factories are mostly financed and operated by Taiwanese business interests. The article looks at life and business in the city mainly from the point-of-view of these 'foreigners'."
track7.org has all kinds of interesting stuff!
I can make you think you've died and gone to heaven.
For forty I'll just kill you and let your soul take its own course.
Writers imply. Readers infer.
Overseas Chinese, especially Taiwanese, are not foreigners. Many of those over 50 were born in Mainland China. They're returning to their native land and regaining some of the money and property that was unjustly stolen from them.
Sounds like crap that will fall apart at those prices...
What next. If China can make it for $40, I'm sure India can make it for $20, (may be next decade or so), whos's next??
Let's hear it for sweatshops!
May we never see th
$40 eh ?
Lemmesee, at the current minimum wage over there, this means that $39.96 is cost+profits and $.04 is the wage of about thirty 14 year old kids...
Who is this Karma guy and why is he bad ??
We want cheap computers, but don't care for politics. Lets use (next to) slave labour in a communist contry!
My biggest problem with semi-conductor companies producing in 3rd world contries is that these factories do no require much manual labour so the money saved isn't that much. Of course land and construction will be cheap.
It is also nice to see the communist government claiming to be more "fair" letting the "evil" market economy enter whenever it is profitable. This makes them even worse, clinging to a lye preventing the people to gain privileges and a better standard while letting the "right" businesses in. I can't help it, but I suspect that bribes and corruption is very wide spread in this kind of areas.
What made the US a super power? (Besides the threat of Nuclear War) The people in the US that were willing to work all sorts of hours. The US became the Hegemony because the US culture has, to varying degrees, penetrated every other culture in the world.
Now China has the most valuable resource: cheaper than hell labor. Now all China needs is to reinvent its culture (again, for the umpteenth time) and, again, the middle kingdom could be the Hegemony.
Amazing what sort of price break you can achieve using near-slave labor.
Paul Lenhart writes words!
Well, anything you can make for $40 I can break for free!
Beat that!
---
"The chances of a demonic possession spreading are remote -- relax."
EricKrout.com
If you celebrate Xmas, befriend me (538
But is the quality of the $40 one made "just outside Hong Kong" the same as the $100 made in the USA?
China is extremely hot right now. I know for a fact that many companies are getting serious about sending their manufacturing to China for cost reasons. Also, the Chinese market is growing at a rapid clip. It won't be long before they are sucking up as much oil as we are, and expecting a higher standard of living.
This might interest some people: The New Silk Road - Secrets of Business Success in China Today. As I indicate in my review, I think the book is good, especially for people who want a 30,000 foot view of doing business in China. I also liked Chinese Business Etiquette: A Guide to Protocol, Manners, and Culture in the People's Republic of China (ISBN: 0446673870). This Etiquette book is more ground level, "tactical", and person-to-person. Combined, these two books will give you a good taste for doing business in China.
In any event, I know that going offshore is having an impact. Not just in manufacturing, but in other areas too, such as programming. It is strange to see whitecollar jobs fly away from the U.S. to places like Hungary, India, Russia, and China. Why? Well, when I was younger, I thought these "brain" jobs couldn't be easily replaced by lower cost labor. Well, that's just not true. The internet has had a lot to do with that, of course. I'd be interested to hear what other folks have to say about outsourcing "brain" work.
How to Download YouTube Videos
Yay! Opression!
Beyond the moral value, do your really want your CD-RW drive put together by an 8 year old boy who has been working for 36 hours straight?
Why is people today only looking at the price ?
Does nobody care at all about the cost on the enviroment, the using of non renewable resources, sweatshop labour.... and so on.
Why always raise these political issues when discussing about china? The article has nothing to say about overseas chinese going back for business to "reclaim their property" or whatsoever
Why talk about politics when it is supposed to be a business/tech article?
And why is it modded +4? Do we have to rant about China's history everytime its name appears on Slashdot?
American Translation: Anything that you can do for 100 dollars we can do for 40 but now its gonna be made out of cardboard, cheap plastic and rubberbands. Maybe a paperclip or two if necessary.
It is an interesting read, but a bit incomplete. While the author certainly indicated that the people who make these products are exploited, not a lot of space in the article was devoted to that issue. In Naomi Klein's book No Logo, the author describes the working conditions, and wages the workers endure.
You can also check out the website for more info.
*** Where are we going? And what's with this handbasket?
It happened 10 years ago. Countries like Malaysia and Thailand have cheaper labour now.
"It works" only if you are looking at the equation from the point of view of money. As the book "No Logo" explains well, there are similar economic zones in vvarious developing countries around the world where people are exploited to produce things at extra low prices so we in the West can get our fix of technology/fashion.
China has a terrible record on human rights and so is a popular place to set up sweatshops. The fact that they are owned by Taiwanese immigrants makes no difference - an exploiter is an exploiter no matter what their race!
I just wish there were more examples of companies using these services listed in the article so that we knew who to boycott!
A little planning goes a long way...
Sounds like the reasoning behind something mentioned under the Power Supply Review, a couple days back, regarding produce it fast enough and let quantity make up for the high failure rates.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
See picture on the first page of the story.
Is that a mouse in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?
Man, if I had benefits like that at work, I'd work harder too!
Now, if those factors are combined with 'Six Sigma' production techniques, it would rival the japanese in quality and cost.
When I was working for a designer lighting manufacturer as a network admin, we were currently in the process of moving our manufacturing process out of Germany over to China, for the simple reason that it was A LOT cheaper. Now, this isn't even electronics, merely simple electrical work w/ designer casings. However, I noted many a time that the German versions were much higher quality than the Chinese varients, though the Chinese ones were often 2x - 4x less expensive, though not 2x worst than the German ones. As far as electronics go, this is not surprising, but quality control is a MAJOR issue here. Things like Abit's exploding/leaking capacitors and such are signs of shoddy parts. There is NO point to buying something for 1/2 the price if you are going to have to RMA it in under a year.
"What can a thoughtful man hope for mankind on Earth, given the experience of the past million years? Nothing." -Bokonon
The article says "It's a postmodern waste-scape of continuous urbanization, broken only by the occasional glass spire of a luxury hotel." Try driving from SF to San Jose down the 101 and you'll get the idea.
One might argue that paying for goods produced in countries with distasteful political systems isn't the smartest thing to do (as it's rewarding the elites, etc). While it might cost more money to purchase goods made outside of such places, I think it's better in the long run.
"any ting you want."
"Anything?"
"Anyting"
Amen brother.
I doubt that China will let freedom of speech reign supreme. Does anyone think these people want to make anything but crap wages their whole lives? Give them a better life, and you'll have the whole system collapse when they want something more for themselves.
Yes, I know the counterargument about this one. Heard it a lot. "Blah blah best wages they ever had blah blah." So here is my response.
Don't you want to make better wages right now? Doesn't everyone? What if they want to unionize? What if they want to speak out against unfair working conditions? What if the corporation is going to have unsanitary and toxic byproducts spilling out all over China...
No wait. We know that one already. Pollute away. Happens everywhere in starting industry. As long as the PRoC gets a little profit, its all good.
I am not saying that it isn't good for the Chinese people that they are getting manufacturing jobs. I am saying that we should excourage them to be as free and open with their work as everyone else. That we should not be satisfied until everyone is livign a standard liek we are, if not better.
Honestly, I really hate the idea that just because a bunch of people live under a jackboot thug regime, it means that they we somehow desrve to be better off and recieve the fruits of exploitation.
everything in china is cheaper there than here, cost for a bus ride is like a penny us. here in states is around a buck to 2. food like eating out would cost us like 10 bucks per person here, in china would only cost us less than 1 dollar for a meal per person.
If the manufacturing is taking place in China and the money is going to China who is going to be able to buy the product?
For example, we are constantly seeing people being made redundant, unemployment rising throught Europe. I can only assume that the US is also suffering. In the long term if the production of most of our goods ships to China, the wealth of the nations will also be shipped there too.
That leaves us in the "West" impovrished, disenfranchised and unable to purchase any of these goods. Sorry to be gloomy but this is NOT good news.
they can make things cheap because of the proximity to the other parts factories and due to the exchange rate differential. Their money is valued at 30% or less of what it should be. Do the MacDonalds burger or Coke can test to verify the real exchange rates between countries. (I'm speaking as an Egineer, who designs in Canada and manufactures in Taiwan).
As I sit here and look at my compter:
UNIX/Linux Consulting
Well, for starters, China is a communist country, which means that business IS properly poltical in their view.
The seizure of assets by China years ago, as well as the present opening up of the market, are both political issues, and there's little you can do to change that fact.
So you're proposing that everyone should be making the trash and there should be no one to take it out? An economics professor you are not.
...manufacturing 'hot zone', situated around the pearl river delta...
Reading this gives me creeps, even though I'm not a radical tree-hugger. Seriously, what are the policies of the Chinese government on industrial pollution? Let them all dump as long as cash flows in? Or something more sensible?
My exception safety is -fno-exceptions.
I wonder how many polutants (i.e. mercury) and other toxins are getting dumped into that river. In a few years, slashdot will be posting news about 3 eyed fishes and three legged babies.
"Your having a bad day when the voices in your head put you on hold"
I understand linking to the odd interesting article, but in the last week of Slashdot we've had: Geek-Chic Power Houses
Hardware Manufacturing in China's 'Hot Zone'
See Ya .su
Could I just suggest each week Slashot post an article called "This month's Wired magazine TOC"? Or, maybe someone has written a screenscraper that autmatically submits all Wired articles?
--- There's no place like 127.0.0.1
That's just too damn many people. Apparently, they can make those 40 dollar items by brute force. Hell, they could make diamonds by having everyone pile on a piece of coal.
Wrong. China can do it cheaper due to employers in China:
1) Do not have to give workers medical benefits.
2) Do not have a "minimum wage" to follow.
3) Have no limits on how many work hours they can instruct workers to work.
Its a slavers wet dream in China.
Anything you can make, We can make cheaper-
/.ers suggest to contribute to the solution? Stop buying consumer goods made in China? Write to congress? To be honest, it seems rather hopeless.
We can make anything cheaper than you!
--
Now seriously. This is really sickening:
No reliable legal system enforces contracts. Theft of intellectual property is routine. Business disputes are often settled by hired thugs; on occasion, those thugs are the local police. But though it can feel like Dodge City, Dongguan works more like 19th-century Manchester, as perhaps the world's most extensive and systematic exploitation of transient labor by mobile capital. And the people who oversee this system -- and profit handsomely from it -- are the officials of the world's largest Communist Party.
While I am not an blind supporter of Amnesty International, I think they are spot-on with regard to China."
We have normalized trade relations with them, coddled them, and deceived ourselves under the banner of "engagement." We should not accept super-cheap components as a result of slave-labor or child-labor. Communism is bad enough, but now we have the worst of both worlds - totalitarian communism and ruthless robber-baron-style capitalism.
Let me be clear - I have nothing against Chinese people, just their government's practices.
What do
Yes, it's a blog. Sorry if that offends you.
that many of the West-based posters here talk about inexpensive being bad quality and Asian factories ran as sweatshops. It's in the political environment many of you were raised in.
Almost all your political foes are of opposing principles from which you hold. Wake up call: your ideals (often misquoted as democracy) are not as free as you see it.
</offtopic>
These sweatshops amount to a whole lot of (for example) the electronic things you use. I dare say that the computer you're using right now also contains these cheap components. Without these inexpensive products, the US economy no matter how massively independent you thought it was, won't be the way it is today. Why do you thing that China (which has so many times be flamed as a human-rights offender by the US) is a preferred trade partner? I guess when it comes to making uncle sam's pocket fatter human-rights can fuck off and die.
Now think before you post anything mindless like sweatshops and poor quality goods from China, Taiwan or any other Asian economy... your lovely AMD processors too come from an Asian country, Malaysia.
Welley Corporation - SLM Scammers
Right...we just pay the import tarrifs/overhead of the stores we buy from when we purchase the same items here.
"Teachers leave us kids alone
I read the entire article and fail to see how your post has anything to do with it.
Do moderators even read the subject at hand before they mod? Or do they just mod on which one "sounds" cool/hip/post-moderern?
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
No, no that's the PLA run factories that are a slavers dream. They use prisoner labor. At least these ROC run factories pay above average wages and start to climb the PRC up the long road to capitalist wealth.
Can't you realize sarcasm when you hear it?
May we never see th
It looks like people move hundreds of miles to Dongguan to work in factories because the wages there are better than they can get at home. That's not slavery; that is, in fact, freedom. Didn't you notice that when you read the article?
Let's see, if I can n dollars at this job writing C code, and I can get ( n * 1.1 ) dollars at that job writing C code, and I get to choose which job I take... That makes me a slave, too!
The wages look horribly low to you, but they're not spending them in an inflation zone like Manhattan or Tokyo. They're spending them in Dongguan, where things are cheaper.
It's relatively cheap to produce milk out in the boondocks where there's a lot of cheap land to graze cows on, but it would be very expensive to produce milk in, for example, downtown Boston. Should we price milk as if it were produced in Boston? Why? It's not costing the farmer that much to produce. If food and rent in Dongguan are so cheap that you can live on $0.21/hour, then $0.21/hour is enough to live on in Dongguan. If you work in a Burger King in Manhattan, they'll pay you more than you'll get paid at a Burger King in Holland, Michigan. That's because in Manhattan, a dollar is worth less than it is in rural Michigan. The Burger King in rural Michigan will also sell you the same hamburger for less money. That's because in rural Michigan, a dollar is worth more than it is in rural Manhattan.
The value of a dollar is people will give you in exchange for it, and that value varies from place to place.
The main gripe of these MBA's et al seems to be that their counterparts graduating across the Taiwan Strait in China seem to be lined up for fat salaries (China style) even before (now where do we remember this from?) graduation or (horror) are even dropping out of college just for the money.
"'Anything you can make work for 1 year, we can make work for 4 days,' Chen says, summing up his commercial philosophy.'"
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?
"It was a dark and stormy night. My name is Jonny Wong. I'm employed at a company in Dongguan that makes the ~/` key for keyboards."
"We've been having problems with a competitor that makes Black ~/` keys. Ours are white or ivory. They're trying to muscle in on our buisiness, they want to take our 2/3rds of the market."
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
He doesn't belong on an assembly line, no sir! He's an intellectual. His role is to tell us how the world should be run; ours is to hop to it and fix things to suit him.
Right now, he demands that everybody on Earth must have an above-average income. I guess we've got no choice but to comply, eh?
In the mid-80's I worked for a company that sold clone IBM's (who didn't in those days?). The owners had contacts in Taiwan who were saying that if we could ship over a motherboard, or anything else for that matter, they could reverse engineer it and have it produced in a few months.
In those day's multi-layer mobo's were not common and ASIC's were rare so it was not too difficult to do. The reason they could cut their costs was the fact that there was no real innovation just R&D (Rip off and Deploy).
From excellent karma to terible karma with a single +5 funny post...
do it
There are 225 million chinese unemployed (counting both rural and urban unemployed) in the PRC that would desperately want these jobs. Out of an estimated 800 million strong labor force that works out to about 28% unemployment. The unemployment rate in the US, last I checked, was 5.9% and people are already very nervous about jobs, nobody's hiring, people are taking a lot more abuse from their bosses, etc.
Get real. As long as PRC employment is so high, people are going to be scared to lose what they have. So what kind of companies are going to go to such a country where the politicians are all corrupt, the bureaucracy is mind numbing, and objectively the whole government has no business being stable with multi-year 20%+ unemployment levels and growth petering out? You betcha you're going to see lots of sweat shops. If the world's really lucky we're going avoid seeing the prospect of a chinese civil war complete with nukes tossed around. But we need to be very lucky for that to happen.
Does anyone know of a list of computer hardware that is actually made in the US? What companies acutally still make things here? Or for that fact electronics in general? or heck even more just items in general??
Ah, yes.
You see, a few people protesting sweatshops *do* have a valid point -- if what they're doing is specifically trying to get existing sweatshops to pay out more money.
The thing is that the entire movement was started by and is a tool for the US labor protectionists.
What you're doing right there neatly falls into the propoganda being put out. You're trying to avoid countries with "unfair labor laws" *entirely*, not trying to figure out what companies there pay their workers more. You're simply avoiding non-US products.
And in doing so, you cause far more damage to the "poor, exploited" foreign workers than the Nike-buyers. You see, the reason those workers are working under such extreme conditions is because they *have* to to avoid starving. Companies can get away with said wages because people there are *starving*.
So, you've been swayed by AFL/CIO images of "giving a poor, exploited foreign worker better wages", and are ending up depriving them of jobs and starving them. Wonderful.
Until there's a labor *shortage* instead of surplus in said countries, there will never be wage increases. Not going to happen.
Ironically enough, buying products from companies with production facilities in said countries is likely to help the workers, since it increases demand for local labor. If the levels of demand can produce a labor shortage...then sure enough, wages will rise.
Any other solution, like government-mandated minimum wages, just produces inflation, as the enconomy corrects itself to keep the buying power of those on the bottom the same.
May we never see th
Trade the word Taiwan for the US and "renegade province" for "nation" and think on that for a moment. We are gleefully tearing our manufactureing base apart for cheap labor and the resulting cheap goods. Once the conversion is complete and our nation is 90%+ 'consumer' and 10%- 'producer'.
What does that bode for the US? What does that bode for the Western World in general?
I think that the long term effect for China is that the nation does change into something else. Too much money, influence, and information is feeding into that nation from the "outside world" their wall will fall too. What the long term effect is for the West? I do not know.
Grimwell - old, cranky, mean, obsessive
And how do you propose to accomplish this? By breaking the economics of the whole deal so they lose their jobs? The factory workers in Dongguan are closer now to our standard of living than they were before they moved there.
Or do you just want massive foreign aid? Do you know what effect foreign aid has in Africa? It feeds people in the short term, but it also drives local farmers out of business. They can't compete with a free gift from the US or the EU. They can't lower prices to zero and make a profit.
Read the article. Taiwanese manufacturing used to happen in Taiwan, but they made so much money doing it that their standard of living is comparable to that of the West. We shipped manufacturing jobs to Taiwan a few decades ago (and to Japan, and somewhat later to South Korea; I hope you realize that Japan is now a more "modern", industrialized country than the USA) -- because our standard of living rose too high for manufacturing to be cost-effective here. Now Taiwan is shipping the jobs to Dongguan. Someday, Dongguan will accumulate enough capital to ship those jobs along to somebody else.
Unless, of course, well-intentioned idiots succeed in fucking the whole thing up and making those people dependent of Western aid for a living inferior to what they're getting now -- and with no hope whatsoever for the future.
What you fail to realize is that Chinese people are responsible adults just like you and me. Let 'em work out their own damnation for themselves, just like us. There is nothing more sickening than Western leftists who want to destroy all hope and progress in the developing world by making countries with a future into helpless, dependent beggar-nations. Yes, if you force them to remain barefoot peasants they'll pollute less and they'll look more picturesque when you go there on vacation, but howzabout if you let them decide whether they want to be peasants or not? Is that totally out of the question? That we could let responsible adults choose their own destiny for themselves? "No", you say? Of course you say that. You want what's best for them, whether they like it or not.
The only big question is this: What happens all the "developing" nations are developed? Where do you ship the jobs to then? But that's a century or two away, and a lot can happen in a hundred years. Meanwhile, there's not a damn thing we can do about it.
Here's my new plan.
/., and submit a story for every story in the magazine. I don't think I can fail!
.less interesting!
.
On the 10th of the month or so, when my hard copy of WIRED arrives, I'm going to head to
All my news sources are converging. . . . i'm becoming . . .
At least that hard copy of WIRED holds up to a month in the bathroom . . .
anything i tell you will cloud your opinion.
Anyone remember that song?
Anyways, remember when Honda and Nissan were crap in the 70's? Then NAFTA was signed and more than a 100,000 manufacturing jobs in the Southeast of America went south with the now famous sucking sound. Then Honda, Nissan, Mercedes, and others realized, around the sametime, that they could avoid paying tariffs if they built the cars in America. Well the foreign auto manufactuers showed up with more manufacturing jobs than the ones that went to the south. Now those cars are not crap. Funny side note, there are more American made parts in a Nissan than a Ford becuase of trade restrictions on foreign auto makers.
A hand up and a foot on every chest...
anything you can produce for $100, we can produce for $40. that's because you give $5 for labor per product, while we only give 10 cents.
You all say 'cheap' and no quality, so why do all the major tech OEMs build their stuff over there?
I sell mostly US made components to US companies, and anyone with ANY size is shipping it all offshore and seem to be making it work.
Then there is the grey market, especially for complete assemblies. 1000 laptops made for company xyz, and 100 out the back door.
Hey, as someone with first hand experience in Dong Guan, Guan Dong, Shen Zhen, Hong Kong and other manufacturing centers of China, I can say that many posts so far are ignorant ramblings of naive posters.
I don't think that you can judge one area of China because a article on the internet says it's corrupt. You should all visit and see first hand. It's not THAT bad...
So the real scoop...
workers live in factory/housing complexes and can be forced to work 24 hrs/day.
food is cooked in 1.5 meter diameter cauldrons, stirred with shovels, and stored in barrels.
karoke parlors are great places to wind down and there are some really upscale places with shows, music, and lots of entertainment. (sauna's or discos may be more iffy)
business deals are sealed on handshakes during business meetings at nice karoke clubs.
the average salary of a Educated College graduate programmer is around 2000US annual (decent for the cost of living and government subsidized housing).
Anyway...you get the idea. It seems crappy to us, but we are all spoiled. In reality, most of non-industrialized China is worse off. The most horrible thing is the general air quality and water quality...I thought I was gonna die and I couldn't wait to get back to the US.
For general reference, the primary customers of these "sweat shops" are industrialized countries...I saw game boards, AOL CD tins, halloween decorations etc...Container after Container after Container was being shipped out from the port in ShenZhen and in HongKong. Ever wonder why the west coast port shutdown affected us so much? Most of our shit comes from over there. It's cheaper to produce there than probably in any other part of the world. You just need to "Guanxi" or network really well and get in the goverment loop and not piss off the gangs there and you'll do fine.
I hope everyone is a little more edumacated about this here area of the world. Now go visit, play dice games, drink, and be merry. After all, if you are going to buy all the shit (ram, computer cases, clothes, toys etc...) then you are the ones driving the economic disparity..so you might as well go and see and at least be concious of what really goes on. I did, and I don't think it's too terrible....does that make me a bad person?
Noone remembers the twin towers anymore :( :(
Copping a feel while singing karaoke...priceless
If Chaos Theory has taught us anything, it's that we must kill all the butterflies.
Hmmn. You're either French, or related to Ross Perot.
The only difference between prisoner labor and non-prisoner labor is prisoner not paid. I live in China before moving and know this not change. Still pay is not comparable to that of capitalist countries.
Who said RCA was well built in 1975? Sony cleaned up the electronics market by 1985 by making stuff that was superior.
Today, much of what Sony does is not superior because they have opted to use Chinese slave labor. Seen a dream cube lately? Twenty years ago they were rock solid with a flourescent tube display that auto dimmed but was bright enough to see in daylight. Today, that same machine has a poorly fitting switch and cheap LEDs for a display. But then again, who esle is making anything? The dream cube sits on a shelf next to an even more repulsive RCA from a similar factory.
Wait did I say "slave labor"? Yes I did. China is a command economy run by a party which will enforce it's line by death. No dissent is allowed because there is no free press. Workers may flock to this place, but that is because they are left with few alternatives. Comfort is realative and people are easier to control when you make things we take for granted special and only for the privaleged. Most people, even the special ones are have little choice about what they do. As in 1984, purge is continual for the special.
This system is only working for a few, and only because they have a free economy to sap. Look at the former USSR, now that you can. They had a highly technicaly educated society, yet most things we take for granted were rare, vehicle ownership, TVs, even radios in a country that would love for everyone to have propaganda everywhere! Most if not all women were forced to work so child rearing was communal, as it always was for peasants in Russia. The command economy works by creating artificial scaricty. Without trade with free economies, most ordinary people lived only to labor in what we would consider poverty. This in a country with more land mass than any other and vast resources. Bigwigs lived well, sent their children to good schools and risked a bullet in the back of the head. Communists are always like this. The only difference betweeen China and the former USSR is that countries of the free economies are dumb enough to risk all their capital in a place that will surely take it all when the money stops flowing in.
The article sums it up nicely as it tells us the sickening life of self abuse in wine slop the lucky live we pay for and then the average story. This is you, and the woman is your would be wife:
In background and motives, these workers differ little from Zhang Ping, the hostess at the nightclub. She graduated from high school in Harbin but flunked the college entrance exams (only about half of test takers pass). For two years she worked for 200 yuan a month in a state-owned wholesale company, but it went bankrupt. Then she tried a stint behind a sales counter, but no one was buying much in a city with 25 percent unemployment. Finally, a girlfriend from down south wrote to say there was good work at the nightclub.
Free room and board for slaves and whores who work overtime everyday, how repulsive. That's what you get without laws, contracts and free speach. Surely our trade with such an economy is dragging us down more than it's lifting them up.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Economic Deja Vu
Way back when, American products were considered inferior because it was cheap (compared to Britain, German, etc). At that time, immigrants were all pouring in from Europe, and every one of them was willing to work long, hard hours for little money. Move forward to the '70s and it was Japanese products that were now considered cheap. Those car makers Datsun and Toyota were considered inferior to those American made cars. If you ever decided to check the labels of twenty+ years old electronics products, you'll find most of them were made in Japan. In the 80's many folks (usually of the older generation) believed Japanese products were simply cheap knockoffs of better made American products. In the 80s-90's, Integrated boards such as motherboards were being produced in Taiwan. Again, like previous examples, the Taiwanese was able to leverage their cheaper labour, and produce motherboards and other components. Today, any computer geek knows name brands such as Abit, Asus, Shuttle, etc. But I clearly remember a time when those brands were considered junk, compared to brands such as Intel. How opinions have changed. It's most likely that at some point, the quality of life will go up, therefore increasing the cost of labour, and will basically make China inline with other countries who have experienced the same economic situation in the past.
Cheap labor != crappy products
Many products that are made in China are products that were designed in the US or Japan. Recently, many American companies are now investing vast sums of capital in China, building factories and other product support infrastructures. If for example, Intel decides to start manufacturing 20% of their Pentium cpus in China, one would think they would send some of their top engineers to make sure quality assurance is as good as the other 80% of cpus made. And lets assume that those 20% are indeed shotty work, and the failure rate is horribly high. Wouldn't this be detrimental to Intel's bottom line, as well as their reputation? I doubt Intel would allow that to happen. Same goes with automobiles. Some US and Japanese auto makers are now in the process of building auto factories. These factories will have enough capacity to build a tremendous number of cars. At present, I simply can't see myself or anyone else buy a Chinese automobile, but I can certainly see people buy a GM or Toyota made in China. And who knows, perhaps in 20 years from now, there might exist a Chinese brand automobile, and might even be considered high quality.
-Anonymous Fat Cow
As I like to ask my boss:
You can have it
1. Better.
2. Faster (sooner).
3. Cheaper.
Pick any two.
There is nothing so silly as other peoples traditions, and nothing so sacred as our own.
I'd rather PUSH my Chevy than drive in a rice-burner.
Japanese cars are well-engineered. They're reliable (with the exception of the 3rd generation RX7, which is legendary for unrelated reasons). Everybody I've known who owned an American car had it in the shop at least once a year; a guy I know bought a Focus two years ago and it's been recalled ten times. Ten. He's pricing Hondas now, and he'll never make the mistake of buying an American car again. American cars are junk.
I'll buy an American car when somebody makes one that's worth what they charge for it. Until then, I'm damned if I'll waste my time and money propping up an industry that can't be bothered to make a better car than the competition. It's a free country, with a free market. Fuck 'em if they can't compete.
Fuck the Germans too, by the way. BMWs are almost as bad as Fords (in terms of reliability -- aside from that, they're faster, better looking, and you can change lanes without the whole car flopping around like a kicked puppy).
Your basic point is spot on. One factual error.
The British have some of the freedom and some of the free market economy needed to become a super power, but not the size.
The British, despite their size, was The One Superpower in the past. Britain now has no semblance of a free market economy, and they are just another third world shithole.
Even when you are wrong you are right.
Anything you sell us for $40 we resell for $100 elsewhere
---
* IBM hard drive: Made in Hungaryt m
Not for much longer...
IBM is closing the Hungary Hard drive production.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/2351787.stm
I wonder if its got anything to do with the fact that Hungary expects to become part of the EU in 2004 and IBM will not be able to pay 1st world wages...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/world/europe/2266385.s
Let's hear it for azzholes -- Is that kinda like ... Let's hang a few techno-fascists and burn down a few scab plants ... if history serves that's how the working man got a decent living in the ol' USofA. Don't forget that!
Turn over your keyboard and see where it is made the next time you type. Flip over your mouse and see where it is made the next time you click the link to go to the next page.
I flipped my Logitech mouse over and it was made in China. I flipped my Gateway Enhanced Keyboard and it too was made in China as well.
What we all should do is think about just what we are saying before we type and click another click. Because most of us, are probablly on "China-made" products even as we read slashdot.
Just how are you going to boycot?
I doubt many people will pay $300 for a mobo and
$600 for the processor just so some guys in china they never heard about will make money.
So, for $200 you'd be willling to sell your fellow human beings into serfdom.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Liz Phair is underrated.
Just as a personal retort to the moderator: I disagree with you giving me a flamebait moderation.
I think its a clear fact that there is a problem the western world deals so closely with countries that are just short of openly hostile in so many ways.
"It's not stealing if you don't get caught!"
WTF? OK. I see. You can get really rich by exploiting the cheap labor. But there is no need to glorify the lifestyle of these fucking "foreigners". Fucking bastards, get away from my sisters.
Wake up and look around. American companies like Black and Decker, Master Lock and who know who else are investing tons of cash in communist China so their slave labor can allow them to sell cheeper goods in the US. The engineering is done here and the products are given the standard US warranty. The savings is in the labor. Figure out how Black and Decker can produce a cordlesss drill in a foreign country, then export here and stiull sell it for half what a US built Dewalt costs. The savings is in the labor. The average consumer doesn't bother to look where something is made, they just blindly slap it on the credit card and worry about how they will pay for it later. So the Chinese goods are getting much better in quaality, thanks to US firms exporting their engineering and ideaas to a plaace where the labor is cheap. So the price of goods comes down, but less and less US workers will be able to afford them -- their job has been shipped overseas.
As an expat who has lived in Asia for 11 years, roaming factories and companies both low and high tech all over the region, I must say that this little expose` on Dongguan was pretty damn accurate. The article and several posters did, however, miss a few points:
1. The savings these mfg companies realize compared with US or European based is not only labor and tax. Industrial environmental waste processing is next to nill in Southern China. The place makes Taiwan look like a park refuge, and I tell you, Taiwan is no place for a scenic vacation unless you are into touring large polluted industrial zones, most of them abandoned now. For most tech companies, waste processing is a large cost, sometimes MORE than labor in industrialized nations. That is why so many fabs get moved over.
2. Software piracy is an issue, but it is not SAP, Oracle, Sun and our favorite M$ that lose out the most. Most of these Taiwanese companies are using native Taiwanese ERP software. About 50% of it is pirated, and the other 50% is licensed legally from the Taiwan ERP co's with branch offices in China. Either way, Taiwanese ERP software is WAY cheaper than western solutions.
3. MS has taken a "soft stance" on piracy in China. If they took the same stance they did with companies and individuals alike in China as they have done in Taiwan, there would be an exodus from thier beloved desktop. Taiwan has cracked down hard over the past years, but because the general public can afford it, they still shell out for MS solutions. If China cracked down like that tomorrow, it would not fuel massive MS sales, but would fuel a massive move to GNU/linux and other solutions.
4. I have watched foreign buyer after foreign buyer be entertained daily over weeks of factory visits in China. As a marketing and sales department, try to imagine the budget a firm would need to do that with clients in New York, London, or even Nebraska for that matter. You just can't get your clients so happy for so little after a hard day's work anywhere in the world. And, thier wives are not around and yes there are plenty of things for the client to do at night. And, happy clients come back to buy more.
5. A LOT of Taiwanese money in China is the result of one or a combination of the following:
a. Taiwan firm borrows heavily, boss runs off to China with all the money, firm goes bust. Boss starts new factory in China with money he never has to pay back.
b. Taiwan firm gets money from Taiwan investors (or private lenders), runs off to China, gives shareholders minimum or no return (or defaults on private loans)
c. Taiwan firm has uncompetitive business but nice pension fund built up. Taiwan boss transfers pension fund to China, starts new factory. Taiwan employees left with nothing as Taiwan company goes bust.
d. Taiwan firm some how burns down in flames, literally!!!. Fortunately, boss had insurance, and decides that the insurance payout is better invested in China. Oh, and he had two policies so doubled his capital.
Of all four above, I have personally known of a firm in each case that has done it and got away with it. Cheap capital (as in extorted), is just another competitive advantage these guys have.
So, why does China let them get away with it? Because China is the next manufacturing superpower. That's right, in 5 years you will be lucky if you can find 10% of the goods on US shelves made in the USA. Even if they have the tag, those goods are probably assembled in the USA from components and sub assemblies made in China, Mexico, Indonesia, India, or wherever it is cheaper than the US. There are just too many arbitragers out there looking for a buck.
Real men don't need signitures!!!
I'm currently driving a 1986 Honda Accord that has 245 THOUSAND miles on it. The worst problem it has had so far was the alternator needing to be replaced. It runs great still. Heck, the radio doesn't work and the heat/ac is broken. But it drives!
I love Japanese cars.
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
Here's the way it works. The guy in the article says that what other people can sell for $100, he can sell for $40.
This doesn't mean that the world gets a motherboard for $40 instead of $100. It means they get that motherboard for $99, with the difference of $59 dollars being split betwen the entrepreneur and corrupt local officials. The workers aren't heroically sacrificing to provide the world cheap goods, they are sacrificing to enrich a class of parasites.
The kind of massive labor cost differential could not last long in a place where government officials are responsible to the people, and the workers had a right to independent unions. It is supported by a government that is run like a mafia to exploit the labor of the workers.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
'Anything you can make for $100, we can make for $40'
I can produce $100 bills for $100 each. If I can purchase some from you for $40 each (and I want real US $100 bills, not those cheap counterfits), I will buy all you have.
Hmmm... but I guess you guys don't actually make money, do you?
For every post, there is an equal and opposite re-post.
Sorry neither!
You must be from a 3rd world country though or a manufacture that produces from a 3rd world country.I didn't say only buy from your country only, I said from countries that: "If it isn't made where labor is comparable to where you live." So I guess since you live in a 3rd world country you can buy from there.
Face it. You keep buying products from companies that move to 3rd world countries where are you going to work??? Selling those products from those places, working the service counter at some food place,...Lot of consumer products are throw away now. So you won't be servicing them.
They even talk on this article about the white-collar brain jobs. They are leaving to 3rd world countries.
So you are batting for the 3rd world countries, that probably don't even buy 80% of the products they make. I will still be nice to you when I come to the counter at McDonald's to buy a hamburger though.
As a chinese student studying in US, I do have something to say.
a lley/43 5 0115.htm [siliconvalley.com]
> by Anonymous Coward
> Overseas Chinese, especially Taiwanese, are not foreigners.
> Many of those over 50 were born in Mainland China. They're
> returning to their native land and regaining some of the money
> and property that was unjustly stolen from them.
Usually every time Slashdot has a story anything related to China, communist bashing usually follows. You know this world is full of catch-22s. Nationalist's land taken over by communist. But wfterall, what the United States did build on is their strong military power. Quoted from Black Hawk Down, "When bullets go pass your head, politics go right out of the window." But guns speak for politics. Every countries struggle like this, think about history of Texas and Israel. They fight. Power struggle.
For human right records, China certainly does not have a word to say. Lest not forget Tiananmen Square, but watched out for next 5 to 10 years. Power struggles and in-fights in the regime be taken account over this
>Asia feels heat as sofware piracy rises
>http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconv
>
>Microsoft Corp said on Wednesday software piracy was on the rise worldwide and
>China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Malaysia and Indonesia were the "hotspots" in Asia
>where major counterfeiting activities thrived.
Yes, you are absolutely right. Now think about this, if you are a student, your monthly wages is less than $125 USD and you want to do 3D graphics just like you slashdot readers do, will you choose to buy a Maya 4.0 student version for a pirated $4 USD CD or $400 USD student version ?
Globalization hits every corners of the world. China is forced to open its market and they have to change, but standards has yet to follow. You really can't compare the wage of average Chinese wages with a piece of Microsoft Office.
By the way, ask yourself, did you ever you Napster, LimeWire, Gnutella and Hotline grab your favourite MP3's and Warez ? Pretty much the same moral story you know. It spares money (for more beer).
And of course again, that's why Linux is pretty hot. Watch out for the Redflag Linux.
> by aburnsio.com
>About third-world outsourcing brain work: don't do it.
>
>Every company I've heard of doing this, and every programmer I've talked to that's had
>to work with these third-world outsourcing companies, has had absolutely nothing good
>to say about it. There may be exceptions, but in every case I know if it's nothing short of a disaster.
>
>I don't want to sound pompous and say that third world programmers are no good, but usually they are no good.
First, think about should you classify China as a third-world country. Frankly it's kind of hazy to classify it between developed country and developing country.
It really depends on what kind of jobs for outsourcing isn't it ? Humans are hard to manage anyway. My analogy is to think about long distance love. Some do work out some don't. I bet you can't ask them to to a lexical analysis stuff but I'm sure most Chinese CS students have no trouble competing contracts on Visual Basic and MS SQL, and many MCSE, Cisco and Orcale stuff. In case you don't know, many favourite CS books in the States such as "UNIX Network Programming" by W.Richard Stevens have been licensed by academic publishers of Tsinghua, (I got one for $9), so watch your back and work hard on your CS class......
Watch out for Microsoft Research in Beijing. They do a lot of SQL stuff don't they ?
>by Astrorunner
>"any ting you want."
>
>"Anything?"
>
>"Anyting"
I don't find this particularly funny. There're many good Chinese that speaks English well too, those who speaks English AND Chinese well will earn a lot there. I know many Asian American friends see this trend.
And again, many Japaneses don't speak good English, but money speaks, saving speaks. Look at your logitech mouse.
Processor prices are limited by yield (aka. how many good processors come out of the factory) which is entirely limited by technology. Their fabrication technology is not better than ours right now. If anything, it is far far behind. There is no way that they can produce chips cheaper than we can.
Of course they could possibly get some non-proprietary hardware cheaper, and make their workers work for less. However chip errors occur because of microscopic particles in the air and slight jolts and bumps from a mechanical handler. These are not things that foreign manufacturers have a better handle on than we do. The number of working dies(the chip before its packaged) per silicon wafer is the most important factor in chip price.
Those girls are making better money than they could ever make back home in the village, meeting more interesting and educated people, and doing far less demanding work.
Given that for the whole of human history women have survived by attaching themselves to men as dependents, given that all marriage is one form or another of what you call "prostitution", why do you suddenly object now? And why do you object to an honest business transaction between equals in China, when you don't object to the twisted and monstrous institution of mutual slavery which we call "marriage" in the United States?
That city in China is a zone of free trade, where free people contract freely with one another. That's why everybody in China is trying to live there. That bothers you, doesn't it? Those girls have something to sell that somebody wants to buy. God bless 'em, I say.
Sexual freedom is as important as economic freedom. The two are inseparable. They have both; you have neither. No wonder you're resentful.
'Anything you can make for $100, we can make for $40,'
I heard Olin King, former CEO of SCI Systems, Inc., say something to that effect about 25 years ago - and they made it to the Fortune 500 on just that kind of attitude.
Unfortunately, there were no karaoke hostesses in Huntsville, AL., at that time.
Everyone will start to cheer when you put on your sailin' shoes.
Your insulting the chimps...
I can do you one better. We have a car that was developed jointly by Chevrolet and Toyota, and assembled in Fremont, CA, US. It is basically an '86 Toyota Corolla with Chevy badging. Ugly little car with a weird beige paint job, but damn, it runs and runs and runs. The original sticker says that it does 25MPG in stop-and-go city driving and 30MPG on the highway. It still maintains that kind of fuel economy today, 16 years later.
Shows you what a little cooperation can do...
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
It's far cheaper than having slaves. Slaves need to be bought with capital. If your slave is injured it costs you money to repair it and protect your investment. These poor people are disposable and probably worse off than slaves.
It's because of cheap CRAP like this Chinese junk that our landfills are overflowing and that millions of Americans are out of work.
We should first stop importing CRAP that supports the Chinese Communist Government.
We should stop importing TRASH that breaks and gets thrown away. We should build things HERE in the USA.
By building the things we need here we will employee many people that NEED work, crime will be reduced, welfare reduce, moral improved, etc.. It's a win - win scenario.
We should build things that are designed to LAST and that can be REPAIRED. This will greatly reduced the landfill problem and will give rebirth to hundreds of thousands of Mom & Pop repair shops. (I remember those from the 50's-60's)
When people aren't buying new JUNK constantly they will have more money to spend on important things like health care and groceries!
Our dependancy on Chinese CRAP will bite us in the ass one day, if China gets pissed off at us and stops all shipment of the JUNK they flood us with this country will grind to a halt. Walmart and Kmart will go bankrupt overnight and life as we know it will be total chaos.
Stop Chinese JUNK imports!!
Yes, china does need to change it's culture to export it. The middle kingdom, we are the center of the world and better than anyone else stuff doesn't sell well to anyone who isn't eithnic chinese. The last guy who had those ideas was hitler. Drop the racism, and a culture might start selling.
Oh, and ps. the souless comunist goverment the ONE china has isn't going to help on the cultural front. China, the one place where a culture was destroyed by itself.
Slavery has been an invaluable institution for thousands of years. It's a fact. The mistake we made in the United States lay in linking slavery to race, when it's clear to any rational person that the incompetence of the poor is absolutely constant across all boundaries of race, creed, and color.
Look around you at the "working poor", with their illegitimate children, their filthy lives, their junker cars, their fat whining wives, their snot-nosed squalling brats, and their total inability to plan or provide for the future.
Slavery improves their lives. It always did. They get security and structure, both of which they're incompetent to provide for themselves. They get their decisions made for them by somebody bright enough to make informed, responsible desisions. When they're too old to work, their security continues. Their safety is guaranteed by the fact that they are a valuable capital investment: Due to their general degradation and mental weakness, they're worth very little to themselves, but to their owner they're worth a great deal and he guards their welfare accordingly.
Slavery is an ideal condition for the poor to be in, and for thousands of years it is the condition they have chosen and preferred above all others.
I'd say one indicator of exploitation is where people work in very unsafe working conditions, with little chance of improving them, and suffer health problems as a result of working. A second one is child labour.
I accept that the reason people work in these conditions is because this is better than the option (starving). But do you approve of child labour or unsafe working conditions? Don't you think we should be trying to find ways to improve social as well as economic conditions?
I accept that protectionist first world countries are terrified of trade barriers coming down because there won't be any industry left in NZ or USA or UK or other first world countries if companies can outsource their production to developing countries for far less cost. Joe Public will be happier when his new auto and tv cost less.
(I'm speaking as an Egineer, who designs in Canada and manufactures in Taiwan).
:)
So if it is cheap crap, don't blame Taiwan... BLAME CANADA!
Monkey.
I can't help but to think that this story represents the future of working conditions for us too. It seems for the last 20 years our prosperity has been built on the backs of laborers such as these.
It scares me to think that the US has become a nation of managers and marketers, with most of the manufacturing going oversees to places where people are willing to work for far less.
It's only a matter of time before the marketing and management jobs follow also. Already more and more of the engineering and other skilled positions are moving to were it's cheaper. And it seems to me that the laws of economics will steadily push the standards of living in all places to be roughly the same. I predict that the American automotive industry will be the next to go the way of steel, textiles, household goods, and electronics. And right on it's heels software and aerospace...
With all these industries elsewhere we'll be free to enjoy the same standard of living as the rest of the world.
It's sad that an insightful article such as this can only generate reactions such as "they make crap", "they're polluting the world" and various forms of implied racial and political bashing.
/. reader.
THINK about what you are actually about to say before you actually type it. Some of your comments are extremely hypocritical and xenophobic in nature and really relects badly on the intelligence of the average
For me the article represents the wild and harsh realities of people at a turning point in their history - hungry for prosperity and wealth which they've always just dreamed of until recently. It's a lot like the old lawless wild west... some will make it big and many will fail in the initial gold rush until law and order and infrastructure is built up in the years to follow.
The article is cool in that it makes us think about how the rest of the world should cope - environment cooperation/trade, business strategies in the changing landscape etc.
Lots of issues are invloved and none are black and white, so slashdotters please put more thought in your comments and ask yourself what is motivating your comments!
Child labor fuelled the Industrial Revolution in the West, and now it's fuelling the same revolution in the East.
It's good for the kids, too: These are poor kids, not very bright, who could never benefit from an education anyway. Instead of being cooped up in school all day, bored stiff by classes they could never hope to understand, they're earning a decent (by their standards) wage. They're gaining valuable skills, getting healthy exercise, and learning to handle adult responsibilities at an age when Western children aren't even capable of handling a child's responsibilities.
Honestly, I envy them.
You have an IBM harddisk manufactured in Hungary?
It wouldn't happen to be a Deskstar 75GXP, would it?
If it is, backup your data ASAP and replace the thing. The 75GXP is infamous for it's unreliability and those manufactured in Hungary are supposed to be particulary bad.
And, oddly enough, this lack of IP law does have consequences (in this case, leaky capacitors screwing up most motherboards coming from Taiwan in the last 6 months) in a global economy:
Read here and here.
As much as a lot of Slashdot readers might not want to hear this, when information is totally free, things suck. Things also suck when rules put in place to protect information are enforced too rigidly or unevenly. The secret is to find a moderating system that finds the proper balance - something that Lessig has been saying all along...
That is all.
It was a matter of unique geographical location that saved the US and let it keep its toys to make bigger toys. No bullies grew up in our backyard. That is the real secret of American dominance. Perhaps people forget it because they are determined to stick with one idea, rather than be equally proud of the truth. There's nothing shameful about being in place and taking advantage of chance. To pretend that a "can-do" spirit was responsible for everything America has now is a rather biased and reckless opinion of history. You'll find inspirational spirit and exceptional people in every culture on earth- America was just in the right place at the right time.
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
There is much more to the equation than cost of labor. Today labor only constitute 15% +- of cost of product. A few month earlier to market will negate any cost advantage that you will find off-shore. Maybe the stagnant PC industry is an exception as the concept of early to market has gone. Read: No innovations.
Help fight continental drift.
--western businessmen hauling their assets to china are short term thinkers and profiters who care not about anything but money. They sell their soul for a few more dollars. This IS going to bite all of them in the butt when china is strong enough and decides that the middle eastern oil fields are their's for the taking. And every time a US company closes shop, lays off and fires workers and moves to china, they also layoff and fire customers. And all of them doing it? The US is headed towards utter bankruptcy soon, IMO. We got strong and grew the world's largest and most successful middle class by being a manufacturing country, and trading within our own 50 state "common market" union. We bout/sold/traded with our neighbors inside the States, this WORKED and worked well for many years, but NO, got to let some CEO's suck down a few zillion more.
/rant
Bottom line it's a heinous security risk being financial enablers of china-just read their own public docs on who they consider their prime enemy, and we are destroying our economy and improving their's as fast as the fatcat CEO's can pull the plug and move to china for a few years short term profit, which will dry up eventually as even at reduced prices with no one working no one will be buying anything. If this move to china crap worked, we WOULDN'T be running a hundred billion plus trade deficit, so there's the dang PROOF it don't work. the only thing china is buying from us is advanced tooling to make more tools and to get stronger, while we layoff people, close factories and become dependent on them. this is NUTS!
And they slap lie about so many things, take unemployment figures. They don't count long term unemployed who have exhausted unemployment insurance benfits but are still unemployed. Try doubling the "official" US dot gov figures for a more realistic number. Cost of living-try re-adding in food and fuel like they REMOVED from the official US dot gov data figures a few years ago to keep the numbers lower than they really are. And how about the corpro/fascist theft of money where the "government" give tax breaks to companies moving to slave/serf nations like china? If that ain't a ripoff or whut. Takingmoney at gunpoint out of Joe USA workers pocket so the company he works for can have their management close shop and move to china. ya some real mastermind economists at work there on that one. short term thinking leading to short term profits and long term DISASTER.
And freeking illegal alien invasion, completely totally irresponsible and out of control, T-totally. Our small county has to build two new schools and the hospital is seriously running in the red to support the masses of ILLEGAL aliens who moved here in just the past few years and get away with breaking the law. A few local big fatcats make money off using these people, everyone else gets their property taxes raised to pay for these profits. Regular folks who only a few years ago could afford a very modest home with one spouse working and the other actually raising their children at home like God intended now have to work two jobs for the same place and have their kids dumped into the lowest common denominator brave new world creche "daycare" where strangers raise your kids. Ya, compete my butt, hard to compete when it's ignored the "recent arrivals" live 12 to a one bedroom apartment, run the same twelve from the same old ratty van with some plate slapped on it and no nuthing else.
The "second worlding" of the US is in full swing, won't be long before there is little left of the middle class. I am old enough to remember any normal blue collar job could afford home ownership, car, and a flock of kids, now that just ain't happening too much more. These globalist goons want a two class society, I call it technofuedalism, the elites, then everyone else. Throw the serfs a few bones now and then and use their mercenary paramilitarypolice to keep the populations in check, EXACTLY like china, which is their model poster boy nation setup. masters/serfs. Gee what a swell model to emulate-NOT!
Here is decent url for anyone interested in being part of the solution rather than the problem when it comes to purchasing products.
http://www.buyamerica.com/home.asp
As to the rest, we have an election coming up, do research see how your local congress critter bozos have been voting on freedom and on USA-first economic issues, and vote accordingly, ignoring those stupid D or R labels. If needs be vote third party or independent, ANYTHING but voting in the same old tired and disastrous loyal to the NWO bozos we got running things now if at all possible.
This is really just economics 101 and has been going on for at least the last two centuries. It is a force of nature of tidal proportions and if you've seen the movie "Network" than you can just insert the rant from Ned Beatty.
The article has it wrong though. Anything they can make for $40 can be bought by just about anyone in bulk for $45. That's the truth. Make your widgets and thingees for however much you can make them and we'll keep shipping green pieces of paper. Somebody here will make even more green pieces of paper reselling them.
China needs to be careful. They have billions to feed and an environment that is becoming quickly polluted.
I bought my car to go places.
I don't know why you'd rather push your car then ride in it, but that's your choice.
This is a very far reaching problem, one that I have read quite a bit about out of concern. Many good points are brought up here, but aside from all the impending doom of the industrial collapse of America (its coming!), we also need to think in terms of defending our homeland: watch ANY show on the History Channell about WWII, and you understand that raw manufacturing capability allowed the US to win the war. The Germans dealt with the reality that "One Panzer is better than 10 Shermans, but there are always 11!" If all of our manufacturing capability resides inside a country that we could potentially go to war with, it means that we've been already beaten, doesn't it? I dwell on this reality very much, and it is depressing. If greed in America (search of cheapest price/ stockholder appeasement) weren't so prevelant in corporate culture, we probably wouldn't have to worry about such things...
It probably has more to do with the fact that IBM has had a horrible problem with quality problems in their hard drives, turning them from everyone's favorite and most trusted hard drive to the manufacturer that no one will ever buy from again because they had so many failures. If I'm not mistaken, that entire line of bad hard drives was manufactured in the Hungary plant. I guess Hungarians can't be trusted to build high-quality high-precision components, so they're moving someplace where people can.
In Europe? At that time?
Ohh, about 40.
Was child labor common in the countryside? Ohh, it was ubiquitous. On farms, kids work. On successful farms in Western nations, kids work. On poor farms in the third world, kids work. All farm kids work, and they always have. You're going to blame that on industrialization or capitalism? Bullshit. It predates both of them by thousands of years. Hunter-gatherer kids work, too.
The problem was not the fact that that they had jobs. Their problem was a lack of decent healthcare and nutrition, a problem which they solved with a little thing we call the "Industrial Revolution".
You can't have a livable society where nobody works for a living. It just doesn't work that way. I agree, sometimes it's a bummer to work for a living, but that's life. If nobody works, everybody starves. Sitting around in front of the TV all day eating potato chips is not the natural condition of the human animal, nor is it natural for children to spend their first twenty-two years as unproductive parasites. That's an artificial condition created by the wealth of the West. Where did that wealth come from? The Industrial Revolution, of course.
Child labor is the only way any nation accumulates enough wealth to end child labor. Any attempt to ban child labor in an undeveloped nation is a knowing and deliberate attempt to prevent that nation from developing. It is an attempt to keep that nation poor and dependent forever.
Idiot.
Yeah, with no development costs ( theft ), no
insurance requirements, no labor unions......
I think you missed what I said. I meant that people the whole world over need to live better. I don't disagree with your points. Nor am I some kook lefty. If I was a kook lefty, I would assume that everyone around me is not as eduated, blindingly noble, and clued in as I AM. I don't believe that at all.
I beleive we should never be satisfied with other people in terrible poverty. Just like the USA is never satisfied with a country until elections occur. As for the Chinese people... MORE POWER TO THEM. As for the Chinese government... screw them. If that make me a lefty, then you really need to establish a difference between what a lefty and a hardcore, freedom nut righty like me really thinks. Cuz it ain't the same.
Also, food aid is usually a UN situation, the last time I checked. Those derelict-duty model-humpers in the UN can't keep their own countries in check, and then try to pass legislation that is biased against those that can.
Oh, and if your nation has a name that has not changed since the time before the bible, Torah, or the al'Quaran, perhaps you need to be taken off of the "developing countries list." That isn't development, its retardation.
There is no inconsistancy in driving a Volvo with a BUY AMERICAN bumper sticker!
...I'll pass.
While China may indeed be a source of purported 'cheap' labor, one should really pay the country a visit, and try doing business with these people to see their true colors, and really see if China is the most viable option for long-term stability. I'm an American businessman in the import- export business, so as you might guess, my frequent travels take me to many places around the world, on every continent.
I wanted to share my experience in the "great" country of China, in the very part described by the article.
So, I was in Shenzhen China last December for about a week on business. A bit of background: Shenzhen, like Hong Kong and a few other places, is a "Special Economic Zone" that the Chinese government set up to try and give foreigners the illusion that China really ISN'T a drab, decaying fascist state that's economically languishing behind the rest of the world. Here, rules are relaxed and capitalism is encouraged, not surppressed. Well, let me tell you this, if this is China's best, then I'd hate to see the worst.
Anyways, when I stepped off the train from Hong Kong (which was no paradise itself, as that place has gone down the shitter since the Brits left) I was shocked. The whole place smelled like a combination of vomit and dog shit that had been left out in the sun for a day or so. And it was probably BECAUSE there was vomit and dog shit all over. I almost retched, and I've certainly been in some sketchy places in my travels but NOTHING like this.
People spit everywhere. Trash litters the streets. I found myself looking DOWNWARD much more than looking FORWARD when I walked.
Noise pollution is endemic. It doesn't help that their infernal language consists of abrupt rapid fire tones that is a cacophony for any human ear to bear. How do they speak and listen to that shit without going crazy all day long is beyond me.
Anyways, Chinamen stink -- literally. There is no concept of personal hygiene whatsoever. Meetings with even top officials were hourlong sessions of having to endure hot sweaty bodies and rancid breath eminating from mouths missing a few teeth. Geez, at least use deodorant for crying out loud.
The hypocrisy, corruption, and double-standards from the highest levels of government on over are the norm at the same time China opens up to the world. Foreigners get charged as much as five times for transportation, lodging, food, and everything else.
Traffic is horrible. Rules are non-existent except for at traffic lights: red means to go fast, green means to go REALLY REALLY fast.
The Chinese people themselve are pretty apathetic and everyone just wants to get out of that hell hole, so you see smuggling rings shipping people out hidden in truck beds and ships, all too often with tragic results.
The whole country, in my assessment is a lost case. Even the cheap labor can be found in Southeast Asia or Mexico. Same goes for pirated stuff -- SE Asia and Eastern Europe will keep on churning them out.
Anyways, the one redeeming quality were the girls. I paid 100 yuan (about $12 US) for a great fuck, with a 16 year old who seemed quite new and "unblemished" if you get my drift. Boy, was she tight, made all the right noises, sucked and fucked all night long and let me cum all over her. Much better than even the vaunted Thai whores, and worlds apart from anything in Las Vegas or in Europe. Best bargain I have EVER found in my life!
So yeah, screw the hell hole that's China. It's a lost cause of a country suspsended by a hollow facade of so-called new capitalism that's just show more than anything.
There's 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
1) Post Wired article to /.
2) ??
3) Profit!!! (karma/posting bragging rights/popularity)
Just hours ago there was another post from the same mag: that article profiled dubious audiophiles and a hot chick.
This one had a hot chick too: but she was pleasuring jaded execs in the "Hot" zone.
Nice one. You get bonus points for structuring your "argument" in a rational-sounding way, and omitting the name-calling which brought your other Troll about the "benefits" of child labor down to a 6.5. You have a bright future of Trolldom ahead of you! Congrats!
Until there's a labor *shortage* instead of surplus in said countries, there will never be wage increases.
Somehow I doubt there will ever be a shortage of cheap labour in a country with over a billion inhabitants, at least in terms of making goods for countries like the US which have populations of 1/3 of that or less.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
this describes the conditions in 19th century northern England to a tee.
The ordinary people there worked damn hard and were poor.
They're still poor.
And the people of southern China will still be poor in 50 years if there isn't major social and political change.
Tickle-down doesn't automatically work.
There was an article in the Economist on the same subject a couple of weeks ago, although with more of a focus on the developments of infrastructure for the region. The proposal to build a (Sunshine Skyway like) bridge from Hong Kong to Macau is particularly interesting. This one has a nice map, which shows the location of all the places in the Wired article. I also made some comments on my blog at the time.
It matters a lot to a country how well my software streamlines production.
Have you heard about the curse of efficiency?
Every inefficiency has some group of people feeding from it. This inefficiency (and their living) is paid by the general populace through the taxes or higher purchase prices.
Making some inefficient process efficient causes these people to lose their source of living. Since we have both democracy (one person - one voice), consumer-driven economy (then more I consume, then better it is for the economy) and more or less advanced social institutions (nobody dies from hunger; society feeds them one way or another), the government is directly interested in preserving these inefficiencies.
However, it can't always stop the progress (if we can call it progress).
As for the US becoming a superpower, WWII played a great role as an enabler. However, it was not the biggest contributing factor. The biggest factor is IMHO competitiveness that is engrained in the American culture. It has always been survival of the fittest until the most recent times when whiny leftists took over the media.
I've had big article on the subject, but it is in Russian. This article shows real goals of globalization, and why/how it is gonna work. It shows why the globalization is absolutely necessary to save the humankind.
Tigers respect lions, elephants and hippos. Maggots respect no one. (C) S. Dovlatov
I remember when Chinese computer components first came into the local market (Los Angeles) in large quantities. At first they were complete crap, cheaply made and clearly with no concept of quality control, and could be counted to barely scrape by and have a short lifespan.
:)
But 3 or 4 years ago, that began to change, and now Chinese products are pretty much on a par with everyone else quality-wise. I no longer cringe when I see "Made in China". This is a good thing all around -- I can save money buying a product whose quality I'm adequately comfortable with, and the money it brings Chinese workers is surely welcome there as well.
It's been the same for every startup-manufacturing process in every country -- they all take a while to get volume and quality on an even keel. We old folks remember when a Japanese car was a wobbly tincan with wheels. About the time Japanese quality went up, Korea came on the scene as the next big cheap manufacturing base, and at first everything from Korea sucked too. And if you go far enough back, you'll find 19th century Europeans' complaints about those manufacturing upstarts in America, flooding the world market with cheap crap.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
There are two problems.
_ 43 /b3805001.htm
1) You don't have the need for a 1000 more educated employees in France; you can't afford to pay them more, and you can't just educate 1000 uneducated workers that lost their jobs.
They won't care much about somewhat* cheaper prices in stores if they don't have any income. And they will need to be fed by the society through the taxation of ones who still have jobs.
2) Look at Taiwan and Japan; as soon as manufacturing took off there, it became inefficient just to use foreign designs and have foreign managers. Modern production requires a lot of skilled professionals, so they invest money in local universities and schools.
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/02
In a short time they take over design, then they take over research. Who cares than that a company is partially owned by some American investors?
Majority of the American population are not these investors.
*Somewhat cheaper because the production and delivery cost is just a part of the retail price. Some goods have pretty high retail margin.
Tigers respect lions, elephants and hippos. Maggots respect no one. (C) S. Dovlatov
Cheaper labor is not just lower wages.
o ct 2002/tc20021023_1339.htm
2 00 2/nf20021023_1209.htm
It is also much less spent on benefits (healthcare), and labor funds, and labor-related litigation. Lawyers made EVERYTHING US EXTREMELY expensive.
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/
http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/oct
Tigers respect lions, elephants and hippos. Maggots respect no one. (C) S. Dovlatov
Hi willis,
I know that pricing apps have to be updated very often (as new derivitavie pricing models on new products are developed). In practice, whould they just be quick hacks written in VBA (probably made by the trader or local quant) that just work, or are they "component"ized and put into the boring but stable framework you describe?
I know its a bit off topic, but I'm interested in this area!
thanks for your comment - i found it interesting and informative
i was the submitter of this story, and i was hoping for more comments like yours on the taiwan-china aspect which is discussed in the article. i've spent some time in taiwan (though none in china) and i find this relationship very interesting. unfortunately any mention of china seems to provoke some sort of blind response in a large number of americans and most of the comments prior to yours were disappointing 'china is an evil regime that exploits it's own ppl and is getting bigger all the time and we are scared' type diatribes that add nothing of value to the discussion
One of my previous jobs saw me working in the textile industry for a short time. The company I worked for used to order directly from China.
The supplier used the latest German Made manufacturing equipment. We had the option, as I am sure is not unusal, of which level of quality we wanted, right down to Quality Assurance Levels. We wanted reasonable quality/cheaper priced products and that is exactly what we got.
I guess what I am trying to say is that just because it comes from a country with lower labor costs, does not make the product crap by default. I now deal with a european manufacturer, and sometimes have to wonder which is better. Admittingly, I am now in a completely different industry!
For those looking at having products made overseas, have a look at Inner Mongolia and Vietnam. Inner Mongolia has recently democratised and some state-owned enterprises were sold to private interests at very good prices. Vietnam seems keen to prove itself on the international stage.
"The big question in our lives is how to be at the same time a hedonist and in a hurry" - Alain Ducasse (?)
If you're going to boycott all products made in countries with lower wages than the USA, I think you need to move to a commune and grow your own food.
The fact is that we live in a global economy where parts for basic infrastructures like telephone, power are often made oversea. Don't even start with the abysmal condition of mines around the world which supplies the raw materials for EVERY manufactured products. Basically, if you live in the modern world (probably since you're on SlashDot) you cannot escape from this.
A more valid question is how to improve the lot of other people less fortunate than you. In that vein, sending manufacturing jobs oversea is NOT such a bad thing. It allows the local industry to develop and help motive the education of local population. While PRC has its problems, it has managed to avoid (so far) some of the nasty pitfalls that Russia has suffered from.
To make an analogy, if you live next door to a family with less wealth. You could offer to let them clean your house for you and pay them a small wage. BUT that's insulting to them and
you refuses. Now, they have less income than the
other alternative.
Does that really help the sitiuation?
Anyways, remember when Honda and Nissan were crap in the 70's? Then NAFTA was signed and more than a 100,000 manufacturing jobs in the Southeast of America went south with the now famous sucking sound
Japanese cars weren't crap at all in the 70's!!!
It was just the American perception of Jap cars. My parents bought a Datsun in 72 and it ran just fine until they sold it in '87.
If you don't understand any of my sayings, come to me in private and I shall take you in my German mouth.
I bet if you know that the only production line of Xbox is located in Pearl region, you will not say this again.
I work in the one of the largest EMS company in the world (google and u will know which). They made all the Xboxes that are shipped to the asia pacific region, North America and Europe. And it is true that they can just crank out xboxes with the minimum cost. The labour is cheap, unlimited supply of industrial land and the huge support of local gov. official, what can you expect more?
Actually, the labour here is so cheap that you can hire 100 workers for the price of one single US worker. And they are all happy to receive that salary. I talk with some of them and they tell me their monthly salary is still triple or even more than what they can get in their home region.
Here is the main article: http://www.cofe.ru/appleubb/noncgi/Forum13/HTML/00 0763.html
0 0420.html0 1039-2.html where I talk about liberals and a bit about human's development.
;).
It has some links, but ones you must read are two Dolnick's articles.
Also of interest might be http://www.cofe.ru/appleubb/noncgi/Forum13/HTML/0
where I talk about China and Iraq, and http://www.cofe.ru/appleubb/noncgi/Forum13/HTML/0
If you have a feedback, publish it there or e-mail me to the address in the profile at cofe.ru (my nickname is mu-mu
Tigers respect lions, elephants and hippos. Maggots respect no one. (C) S. Dovlatov
No, no, don't get me wrong. I know that the conditions are comparatively much worse in the PRC under pretty much any circumstances. Any system with 225M unemployed (rural + urban) is going to have very poor working conditions for those fortunate to have a job.
The point I was making was that the PLA prisoner staffed factories do have a significant difference to the sweatshops run by ROC entrepreneurs. The sweatshop employees are worried about losing their jobs and falling back into the misery of unemployment, the prisoners in the PLA run system are worried more about beatings and executions than not being able to stay longer. I hope you would agree that it is a significant difference.
They would flood the US like a tsunami tidal wave, just like they flood into HongKong now. And they wouldn't care about green cards either (maybe an armada of illegal ships like in Neal Stephensons Snow Crash).
So aren't you glad that China is communist after all? And don't you hope it stays that way a little longer?
Strange if you look at it this way, isn't it?
Idempotent operation: Like MS software, wether you run it once or often, that doesn't make it any better.
Actually, no I'm not glad they're communist. I have a fundamental faith that human ingenuity and hard work when encouraged by a governing system under the rule of law and aimed at human freedom makes a society that's alive, vibrant, and that creates more than it destroys.
Communism is a net black hole, a sink of corruption, human misery, and wasted potential. The few great things it achieves are far outweighed by the price paid, a price which the system spends an inordinate amount of time and effort hiding.
In reality if the criminal ancients who run the PRC all disappeared tomorrow, some would leave but a large number would stay, a situation similar to what really happened to most of E. Europe when the Berlin wall came down. You might get a million or two wave heading out but a lot of those people would head towards places with traditional, longstanding chinese communities because that's where uncle or cousin is already established with a job waiting for them.
Yes, it would be a pain in our ass for 5-10 years but frankly the PRC has been a pain in our ass for 40 years so I'd prefer the solution that led to a net increase in human happiness *and* eventually will end the problem.
I guess I was rather trying to ask hwo much people are willing to give up themselves as a price to pay for communism in another country to end. Or for the situation of others to improve.
You seem to express the hope that for you there would be not much change, because they would not come to your country.
To use your example, after the fall of the iron curtain a lot of german descendant Russians from Russia in fact came to Germany, because Germany has this strange law that grants them the right to do so and get German citizenship if they have german ancestors.
The net result is that some communities in Germany now have a population of up to 30% of these Russian Germans most of whom only speak russian and are unemployed. As you can imagine this is not appreciated by all and leads to conflicts.
So would you be willing to live in a community with 30% Chinese immigrants if that would mean no more communism in China?
Idempotent operation: Like MS software, wether you run it once or often, that doesn't make it any better.
I wasn't trying to say they wouldn't also come to the US, but that they wouldn't only come to the US. Some would be absorbed by traditional chinese expat communities around the world, others would try their luck in Canada, Australia, or South Africa, still others would come here. The impulse would be to make money with large numbers selecting the US but not all of them doing so. The effects of their arrival would be variable but let's assume the worst and that most of them would be illegals. Agricultural workers would suffer as mexican illegals were partially displaced by chinese ones, construction would have the same issue, there would be a gambling boom (and yes, this is from firsthand observation) and the local police would have to track a new set of ethnic crime families. In other words, nothing that we haven't seen before in the US.
The difference between the US and Germany is that in the US we make room for poor, hardworking people with just the clothes on their back to come in and integrate into the country. It's structurally set up that way which is a large reason why we don't have fool proof internal ID papers, entire industry sectors subsist on illegal workers, and many of our government segments won't admit to other sections of our government where the illegal aliens are even though they know perfectly well.
Would I trade a decade of inconvenience for the liberation of a quarter of mankind from repression? You bet, in a heartbeat just as I don't regret the liberation of Russia though we now have to deal with the Russian mafiya when we really didn't have to worry about it before.
Top Ten Things Overheard At The ANSI C Draft Committee Meetings:
(10) Sorry, but that's too useful.
(9) Dammit, little-endian systems *are* more consistent!
(8) I'm on the committee and I *still* don't know what the hell
#pragma is for.
(7) Well, it's an excellent idea, but it would make the compilers too
hard to write.
(6) Them bats is smart; they use radar.
(5) All right, who's the wiseguy who stuck this trigraph stuff in
here?
(4) How many times do we have to tell you, "No prior art!"
(3) Ha, ha, I can't believe they're actually going to adopt this
sucker.
(2) Thank you for your generous donation, Mr. Wirth.
(1) Gee, I wish we hadn't backed down on 'noalias'.
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