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What's In a Tool? a Case For Made In the USA (hackaday.com)
szczys writes: You have the choice of buying a wrench made in the USA and one made in China. Which one should you buy? The question is not a straightforward one. Tools are judged by their ability to do the job repeatedly and without fail. To achieve this, only the best of design and manufacturing will do. But this is a high bar when you factor in price competition which often leads to outsourcing production. Gerrit Coetzee looks at this issue, comparing two instances of the same model of Crescent brand adjustable wrench; one a legacy manufactured in the USA, another outsourced for manufacture in China.
They were one of the most significant holdouts over the past decade or so, but they won't learn from their mistake. They could have learned from vise-grip, who could have learned from dremel, who could have learned from Stanley. Sears (Craftsman) could have learned from any or all of them, as could Husky and Kobalt.
They'll all just go the same way, only to lose the race to the bottom to Harbor Freight.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
"Tools are judged by their ability to do the job repeatedly and without fail" Not necessarily. I might just need it once, or for very light use. It is often true that you get what you pay for, but this doesn't mean you should pay for more than what you need.
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Nothing against US made stuff but you pay extra because of the cost of shipping it half way around the world, and generally the exchange rate makes importing those goods expensive because the of the high US dollar.
There are lots of Chinese tools that are the best in the world.
I’ve worked as an engineer in industry. The one common thread between a quality product and a bad product has always been this, ”Is the person who designed the product involved in making the product?”
This is not an argument for "Made in the USA". This is an argument for the design and manufacture should be in the same place. Therefore, this also makes the case for "Don't just export the manufacturing phase. Also export the designing phase."
-- Thou hast strayed far from the path of the Avatar.
There are a great many human values that an economic system could promote. Capitalism got none of them.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Tools are judged by their ability to do the job repeatedly and without fail.
That's not how anything is judged -- they are judged by expected TCO. And that TCO includes initial cost, minus expected performance but plus the expected value of failures multiplied by the cost of each failure. All of these vary by the job that the tool is being asked to do.
To give an example, if the wrench is going onto a deep-sea oil platform where replacement will be very costly and will cause very expensive delays, the last factor is very high and so reliability will be at a premium.
On the other hand, the local auto mechanic probably has a dozen wrenches and a parts truck that comes around every other day that can bring a new one in for nearly zero overhead. So she might be willing to accept a higher failure rate.
On yet another (third?) hand, someone working in aerospace or other sensitive area will likely need a wrench that can accurately deliver a set amount of torque. In this case, the accuracy of the tool will be the most important concern, since failure of the product (satellite, jet engine, space shuttle booster rocket clamp attachment) will be far more costly than failure of the tool.
So there you have it, three examples of how making general statements about how we judge things is complete bollocks. The "right tool for the right job" might be cliché but the lesson is less about picking the right tool and more about thinking about the properties that are priorities for the job.
Education, for one, is sorely lacking. Here's an example of someone living a historically luxurious life without the faintest idea where it all comes from.
Dance like you're hurt, Love like you need money, and work when somebody's watching.
-Scott Adams
From a comment at TFA -
"Another thing that can give an idea of the scale of corruption in China. If you haven’t seen them, I highly recommend you look up the Chinese “ghost cities”, and be amazed. Entire cities – including upscale homes, apartments, malls, business complexes. Built only because government grants covering the cost of construction were available to developers. But they weren’t needed, there’s no one to actually occupy them (or perhaps no one who can afford to do so), and many are now crumbling due to disuse and neglect."
Because the highest value in socialism is politics and LOOKING like you're doing something... not making sure you make best use of your resources.
At least with capitalism there's feedback in the system so that when resources do get excessively wasted somebody can actually get in there, make more efficient use of them and... eat your lunch.
Voting with your dollar only works if you have a choice. If all companies have headed into the downward "cut costs at an costs" spiral then you have no real choice.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+