Let's say you build a HUGE ass wind farm in the united states, in wyoming (massive wind speeds) over farm land (transparent blades so nobody has epileptic seizures, though that's irrelevant). Wyoming is remote, and probably doesn't have a crap ton of power routing infrastructure.
Now, the problem with this arrangement, is that the wind is in wyoming, where as the power demand is on the coasts. Shipping this power over would require a multi billion dollar investment in transmission infrastructure. It would probably be alot cheaper to just wire them all up to a carbon to gasoline system and ship it overland. Since wyoming has coal plants (~85% of power generation), all you need to do is pipe the carbon dioxide in from the coal plant, convert it to gasoline and you're done. You've instantly made a massive dent in the local gasoline consumption, which frees up gasoline for other states to consume. The intermittency of the power is completely irrelevant to the operation of the air-to-CO2 plants. When you've got wind generation and power demand, you generate wind power to displace coal. When you've got more supply than demand, you run your conversion plants. You'll loose efficency when the wind IS blowing but the coal plant isn't running, however you could probably solve that by storing the CO2 in a borehole and using it during the night.
Just build a special lane for the buses and make them go 150MPH and computer controlled with a bus driver for emergencies. Problem solved. Gas guzzling, efficent, and fast.
I can also vouch for the difference in mindset between America and Japan. Also, in Japan riding on sidewalk, while technically illegal, is never prosecuted unless an accident happens, so it's quite common. It used to be legal.
Although little kids in my town tend to be barred from commuting by bike, some middleschools and all highschools allow it so it gives kids the freedom to get around town (longest bikeride in my town is probably an hour) and unhinges them from relying on their parents for transportation. It's pretty great.
I myself have logged about 5000 miles in 4 years and you'd have to pry my 4 bikes out of my cold, dead hands.
I can only give annecdotes from my friends, as I fall under one of those people who'd "rather avoid the costs of car ownership" as for me, not having a license, the price for me of license acquisition, car purchase, and settling shaken and such would probably reach $8,000.
From what i've heard, having a mechanic that will purposefully attempt to force you into a repair that they see as unnecessary is pretty rare. Strictly from anecdotes from the friend's i've had who were car owners, local mechanics seem pretty honest.
Let me set my thoughts out straight for you, so this makes sense in the context of the word 'Absurd' I put in the begining of my post.
The Shaken exam system, in addition to guaranteeing road safety and the like, is structured in a way that makes it increasingly cost prohibitive to drive you car past 10 years, regardless of the road-worthiness of the vehicles. As other posts in the conversation have said, it is EXPENSIVE as heck.
Used parts are scarce and almost never used, as they are usually used to fix up cars going out for export. New parts are freakishly expensive. My friend has his Shaken due up, and he got an estimate for $2500 to replace the suspensions in his car, as they had gotten squeaky. As another poster has mentioned, they'll ask you to replace a part because it's 'too old', not because it's dangerous or unsafe. And by law, you're obliged to replace it or you won't be able to drive your car. You can take it to another shop, but once Shaken is past due, you cannot drive your motor vehicle, you have to tow it. And estimates cost a butt ton too.
After 10 years of age the car is Shaken'd EVERY year.
Would you be pleased if every 2 years you're mechanic got to take a look at your car, test to see if everything works, then REQUIRE you to replace every single part (with new parts) he happens to think it be wise to replace? You've heard lots of stories about shady mechanics saying that a part needs to be replaced, when it infact is in perfect working order, right?
What this all boils down to, is that the Shaken system ends up making cars economically disastrous to own after 10 years or so, which in Japan equates to probably about 70,000 miles. I'm from America, and i'm not sure where you're from, but could you imagine if the government in your country happened to make he car exam so strict, and so costly that eventually after driving a measily 10 years in your car, it was cheaper to buy a new car and pay the car payments, then it was to continue to pay the shaken and keep your car on the road? If that were to happen to America, probably at least 1/4 of the cars on American roads would disappear over night. Japan is a country of new cars, and it's also a country where car ownership is much lower than other areas of the world BECAUSE it's so expensive to drive. Many younger people would prefer to bicycle or bus rather than own a car, and pocket the probably $3000-4000/yr cost of running a car.
Good? Maybe. Would you want to be subject to the same system? That's for you to decide. I'd be curious to hear.
This may be flame bait, but i'm pretty sure Newton was one of the most fanatical (I'm pretty sure today he would be regarded as a Christian Fundie) scientists in the world. And yet, his advancements are extremely important to our modern understanding of the earth. Just because some people may have ulterior motives for pushing a particular theory doesn't mean all contributions they make to science are instantly invalidated.
Oh, and to add to this.. in case you point to mandatory insurance as a reason for the high premium, the mandatory insurance only covers bodily injury to the other driver. Max payout is roughly $400,000 in case of death, $500,000 for injuries requiring constant care, and for injuries it's a sliding scale.
According to the wikipedia article on vehicle inspection in europe, european vehicle inspections tend to run about 100 euro or thereabouts. So even in countries which require insurance every year (not all of them, many of them require insurance every other year) you're still paying 5x as much in Japan .
How much does that inspection cost? In Japan, it's about 1000 euro before parts.
My friend had a car who's suspension snapped in half 6 months AFTER passing the inspection, so it isn't foolproof either. Here's roughly what you're paying 1000 euro for, according to Wikipedia
An exterior inspection to ensure the vehicle meets Japanese exterior regulations and does not have illegal exterior modifications such as extreme[vague] body kits. A wheel alignment inspection to ensure the vehicle has its wheels in-line and can turn correctly. A speedometer inspection to ensure the vehicle's speedometer is accurate. A headlamp inspection to ensure that the vehicle's headlights are correctly placed and aligned. A brake inspection to ensure the brakes work correctly. An exhaust gas/muffler inspection which includes testing carbon monoxide and hydrocarbon emissions along with exhaust noise levels. An undercarriage inspection which includes looking at suspension parts.
No, they have an absurd system where the car needs to pass an inspection every 2 years, variable cost depending on the vehicle ($600 for 'light cars' (660cc cars), $1200 for normal cars, more for trucks etc..) and basically check all of the high wear parts on the car, and throw in compulsory auto insurance. What this tends to do, when the car starts to wear heavily, is to make repeatedly paying the shaken more expensive than buying a new car (3 year exemption) or a used car that hasn't degraded as far.
What ends up happening is that it ends up getting sold to a car export company, which will offer to take this newly worthless car off their hands (can't drive if the car inspection certificate is expired) and prepare it for export to various left driving countries for a handsome profit (A car that's worth $0 in Japan due to Shaken might be worth $4000 and have another 100,000+ miles in it in another country. Japanese cars tend to get low mileage because the average Japanese person I believe only drives a few thousand miles per year due to the compactness of their cities. Thus, after 10 to 15 it might have only gone 90,000 miles and after of wearing the car still has a ton of life left in it.)
What this also insures is that there is never an unsafe or rust bucket type car on the road. Cars in Japan tend to be aesthetically perfect.
I think that while carbs may contribute to obeisity in the american diet, they are not the root cause of it.
Otherwise you would see tons of fat chinese, japanese and korean people running around, but I live in Japan and I can count the number of obese people I see in a day on two hands. When I went back to America, I lost count in about 2 minutes.
High carb diets are not inherently fatening unless you are sedentary and/or are eating inappropriate portions. The same could be said of ANY food.
Just in reference to the hydrogen bomb: A nuclear plant is more dangerous in the hand of a government then a hydrogen bomb, because hydrogen bombs don't go off when natural disaster strikes.
Hydrogen bombs and nuclear weapons, and most armarments in general, are designed so that a castrophic event disables them, not triggers them. Non upgraded old nuclear reactors cannot due this due to the lack of passive saftey.
Comparing nuclear reactors are to hydrogen bombs is like comparing is like comparing handgun ammo to anfo. Both are completely safe under standard conditions, but i'd be willing to bet that given catastrophic earthquakes, floods, hurricanes and the like, you'd see a higher accident rate with nuclear plants (and handgun ammo) than hydrogen bombs (and anfo)
Let's say right now, that a hard disk costs $300 for a 3TB drive. And helium tech allows the same drive to be made, almost free, for a capacity of 4TB. That's probably $100 aditional value seen by the consumer.
Right now if we say that the hard disk, with a good estimate, has about 10 cubic inches of 40 cubic inches of helium in the drive, and leaks 2 cubic inches per year.
At current helium prices, the price for a cubic foot of helium as far as I know is about $5. So you're paying $5 for 144 cubic inches of helium. So you're drive costs $5/77 or 10 cents a year to sustain. Let's say the hard drive has an average service life of 10 years.
That's about a dollar over the lifetime of the hard disk.
Now, if helium provides proportional gains over the conceivable lifetime of the hard disk technology, helium could go up 50x in price (pushing out MRI, welding, etc...) and STILL provide a massive economic advantage.
I'd also like to point out that if the average drive leaks 2 cubic inches per year, and 500 million drives are in service, they will consume 0.02% of the world wide helium consumption of 85 million cubic meters per year.
My best guess is that they'll have a low pressure sensor and a refill valve. A good seal should be good for several years, and topping back up on helium should be pretty trivial.
Helium is cheap. Atleast, in the quantities that would be used in hard disks. If each drive leaks a cubic inch per year, and you have 50,000 drives, you're probably looking at a 4000-6000$ recharge cost per year, just for the raw gas. Small price to pay for increased capacity and decreased volume per unit of capacity per disk.
This may be a dumb question, but isn't alot of the netherlands built on land that was flooded by rising sea levels? Is it impossible to just build a seawall where it's necessary?
I'm assuming this is a joke, but i'm doing the math because I enjoy challenges.
Melting the arctic ice would be nearly impossible with an icebreaker.
If we do a quick thought experiment, let's say that the ice is 1 meter thick (probably SEVERE lowball). This means that a 1 meter thick path, 200 meters wide, would contain 200 cubic meters per 1 meter of path.
Now let's extrude that into the (i'm guestimating here) 4000+ miles of Russian arctic coast. That comes out to 6000km. So you're path 200 meters wide would be roughly 1500 square kilometers of ice. That's 1,500,000,000 cubic meters of ice. This equates to 1.5 trillion liters of ice. That's about 3 trillion pounds of ice.
1.5 trillion liters of ice, assuming normal atmospheric temperature and pressure, is about 1.4 million KG of ice. Water ice takes about 334kj per killogram of ice to melt from 0 centigrade to 1 centrigrade. If we assume that ice breaker that generates 60MW electric, assuming 33% efficiency that's 180MW thermal. Assuming all of the heat energy from the reactor was 100% efficently transfered to the ice, melting that road through the arctic waters would take a relativley short 88 years and about 3 months....Yeah, and it refreezes every year.
This isn't something you can do with heat, in any meaningful timeframe for a reasonable cost.
I must admit, that I know absolutely nothing about working conditions in labor camps. However, I feel that the situations aren't directly comparable. At Foxconn, people are coming from the countryside, in their OWN country, from what I can imagine to be largely agricultural labor conditions. They're going to get a higher income. Nobody forced them to go there, there was an economic incentive to propel them to go there.
This would put the average Foxconn worker's salary at a very high level, in terms of living expenses and local prices this would probably be equivalent to a US auto factory worker, and about equal to what my mother is getting at her full time university position.
Even if labor conditions are poor, and overtime is rampant, they're still getting a before overtime salary double the agree'd minimum wage in the province, and will soon be getting quadruple it. Thus, most of your analogy (being 'stuck' somewhere, unable to finance moving to another job) is largely irrelevant to this discussion, and a poor parallel.
Well, I wasn't trying to use that article as a comment on foxconn's awesome wages, just a reference point to the actual current wage. I consider it to be pretty reasonable, considering my experiences with living costs in China. It'd certainley be an upgrade from the countryside. It's a living wage for sure.
I was under the impression that we were talking about Foxconn regular emloyees salaries. The students, for sure, are getting a raw deal, but internships very rarely pay full salary. However, Foxconn's full employees seem to be getting quite decent wages for their work.
In my experience, if Foxconn is supplying them with free lodging and giving them subsidized food, $350/mo is roughly equivalent to $29,000 a year in America. Still pretty bad for having 60 hour work-weeks, but not outrageous for the country in question. Given that alot of the workers are probably coming from the countryside, i'd say most of them see it as an upgrade to their lifestyle as soon as they leave the corp and go back to their hometown with a years worth of decent wages saved up, would probably help them started a business or go to school.
My basis for this statement: Living in China for 5 years, and 2 trips back within the last 4.
You build the strategic reserve when there's a supply glut, so instead of crashing supply down to $2.5/pound, you keep it at 4. You're doing something wrong if supply is restricted enough for it to jump to 7 and 8, and probably aren't making as much as if you had enough supply to push it through at $4.
There's also this article, which points to fluctuations in yield year-by-year. If people are used to paying X amount, they might not like it if price gets jacked up to double that.
In the article it said that Japan and China were new markets. I don't know about China, but any foreign product in Japan is generally seen as a luxury item, and demands significantly higher price. Over here a pound block of sharp cheddar cheese can cost $15. (This is probably atleast 2x, if not 3x what it is back in the states.)
Using production during lulls in your demand in order to make sure you have product to sell while you're growing in certain markets, and keeping the supply stable, will probably help solidfy the notion that maple syrup is something you can introduce as a regular part of your life. It's kind of like hydro pumped storage. In China, due to the cost sensitivity, if suddenly maple syrup becomes unaffordable (imagine paying $60 for a bottle instead of $10. Some people can pay it, but many people might not), people might drop it and move on.
Keeping supplies steady and prices stable would probably help you move more product.
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Let's take another example.
Let's say you build a HUGE ass wind farm in the united states, in wyoming (massive wind speeds) over farm land (transparent blades so nobody has epileptic seizures, though that's irrelevant). Wyoming is remote, and probably doesn't have a crap ton of power routing infrastructure.
Now, the problem with this arrangement, is that the wind is in wyoming, where as the power demand is on the coasts. Shipping this power over would require a multi billion dollar investment in transmission infrastructure. It would probably be alot cheaper to just wire them all up to a carbon to gasoline system and ship it overland. Since wyoming has coal plants (~85% of power generation), all you need to do is pipe the carbon dioxide in from the coal plant, convert it to gasoline and you're done. You've instantly made a massive dent in the local gasoline consumption, which frees up gasoline for other states to consume. The intermittency of the power is completely irrelevant to the operation of the air-to-CO2 plants. When you've got wind generation and power demand, you generate wind power to displace coal. When you've got more supply than demand, you run your conversion plants. You'll loose efficency when the wind IS blowing but the coal plant isn't running, however you could probably solve that by storing the CO2 in a borehole and using it during the night.
This is the situation where it makes good sense.
Just build a special lane for the buses and make them go 150MPH and computer controlled with a bus driver for emergencies. Problem solved. Gas guzzling, efficent, and fast.
I can also vouch for the difference in mindset between America and Japan. Also, in Japan riding on sidewalk, while technically illegal, is never prosecuted unless an accident happens, so it's quite common. It used to be legal.
Although little kids in my town tend to be barred from commuting by bike, some middleschools and all highschools allow it so it gives kids the freedom to get around town (longest bikeride in my town is probably an hour) and unhinges them from relying on their parents for transportation. It's pretty great.
I myself have logged about 5000 miles in 4 years and you'd have to pry my 4 bikes out of my cold, dead hands.
What about the (probably approaching 150%) fuel taxes?
I can only give annecdotes from my friends, as I fall under one of those people who'd "rather avoid the costs of car ownership" as for me, not having a license, the price for me of license acquisition, car purchase, and settling shaken and such would probably reach $8,000.
From what i've heard, having a mechanic that will purposefully attempt to force you into a repair that they see as unnecessary is pretty rare. Strictly from anecdotes from the friend's i've had who were car owners, local mechanics seem pretty honest.
Let me set my thoughts out straight for you, so this makes sense in the context of the word 'Absurd' I put in the begining of my post.
The Shaken exam system, in addition to guaranteeing road safety and the like, is structured in a way that makes it increasingly cost prohibitive to drive you car past 10 years, regardless of the road-worthiness of the vehicles. As other posts in the conversation have said, it is EXPENSIVE as heck.
Used parts are scarce and almost never used, as they are usually used to fix up cars going out for export. New parts are freakishly expensive. My friend has his Shaken due up, and he got an estimate for $2500 to replace the suspensions in his car, as they had gotten squeaky. As another poster has mentioned, they'll ask you to replace a part because it's 'too old', not because it's dangerous or unsafe. And by law, you're obliged to replace it or you won't be able to drive your car. You can take it to another shop, but once Shaken is past due, you cannot drive your motor vehicle, you have to tow it. And estimates cost a butt ton too.
After 10 years of age the car is Shaken'd EVERY year.
Would you be pleased if every 2 years you're mechanic got to take a look at your car, test to see if everything works, then REQUIRE you to replace every single part (with new parts) he happens to think it be wise to replace? You've heard lots of stories about shady mechanics saying that a part needs to be replaced, when it infact is in perfect working order, right?
What this all boils down to, is that the Shaken system ends up making cars economically disastrous to own after 10 years or so, which in Japan equates to probably about 70,000 miles. I'm from America, and i'm not sure where you're from, but could you imagine if the government in your country happened to make he car exam so strict, and so costly that eventually after driving a measily 10 years in your car, it was cheaper to buy a new car and pay the car payments, then it was to continue to pay the shaken and keep your car on the road? If that were to happen to America, probably at least 1/4 of the cars on American roads would disappear over night. Japan is a country of new cars, and it's also a country where car ownership is much lower than other areas of the world BECAUSE it's so expensive to drive. Many younger people would prefer to bicycle or bus rather than own a car, and pocket the probably $3000-4000/yr cost of running a car.
Good? Maybe. Would you want to be subject to the same system? That's for you to decide. I'd be curious to hear.
This may be flame bait, but i'm pretty sure Newton was one of the most fanatical (I'm pretty sure today he would be regarded as a Christian Fundie) scientists in the world. And yet, his advancements are extremely important to our modern understanding of the earth. Just because some people may have ulterior motives for pushing a particular theory doesn't mean all contributions they make to science are instantly invalidated.
Oh, and to add to this.. in case you point to mandatory insurance as a reason for the high premium, the mandatory insurance only covers bodily injury to the other driver. Max payout is roughly $400,000 in case of death, $500,000 for injuries requiring constant care, and for injuries it's a sliding scale.
According to the wikipedia article on vehicle inspection in europe, european vehicle inspections tend to run about 100 euro or thereabouts. So even in countries which require insurance every year (not all of them, many of them require insurance every other year) you're still paying 5x as much in Japan .
How much does that inspection cost? In Japan, it's about 1000 euro before parts.
My friend had a car who's suspension snapped in half 6 months AFTER passing the inspection, so it isn't foolproof either. Here's roughly what you're paying 1000 euro for, according to Wikipedia
An exterior inspection to ensure the vehicle meets Japanese exterior regulations and does not have illegal exterior modifications such as extreme[vague] body kits.
A wheel alignment inspection to ensure the vehicle has its wheels in-line and can turn correctly.
A speedometer inspection to ensure the vehicle's speedometer is accurate.
A headlamp inspection to ensure that the vehicle's headlights are correctly placed and aligned.
A brake inspection to ensure the brakes work correctly.
An exhaust gas/muffler inspection which includes testing carbon monoxide and hydrocarbon emissions along with exhaust noise levels.
An undercarriage inspection which includes looking at suspension parts.
No, they have an absurd system where the car needs to pass an inspection every 2 years, variable cost depending on the vehicle ($600 for 'light cars' (660cc cars), $1200 for normal cars, more for trucks etc..) and basically check all of the high wear parts on the car, and throw in compulsory auto insurance. What this tends to do, when the car starts to wear heavily, is to make repeatedly paying the shaken more expensive than buying a new car (3 year exemption) or a used car that hasn't degraded as far.
What ends up happening is that it ends up getting sold to a car export company, which will offer to take this newly worthless car off their hands (can't drive if the car inspection certificate is expired) and prepare it for export to various left driving countries for a handsome profit (A car that's worth $0 in Japan due to Shaken might be worth $4000 and have another 100,000+ miles in it in another country. Japanese cars tend to get low mileage because the average Japanese person I believe only drives a few thousand miles per year due to the compactness of their cities. Thus, after 10 to 15 it might have only gone 90,000 miles and after of wearing the car still has a ton of life left in it.)
What this also insures is that there is never an unsafe or rust bucket type car on the road. Cars in Japan tend to be aesthetically perfect.
I think that while carbs may contribute to obeisity in the american diet, they are not the root cause of it.
Otherwise you would see tons of fat chinese, japanese and korean people running around, but I live in Japan and I can count the number of obese people I see in a day on two hands. When I went back to America, I lost count in about 2 minutes.
High carb diets are not inherently fatening unless you are sedentary and/or are eating inappropriate portions. The same could be said of ANY food.
Just in reference to the hydrogen bomb: A nuclear plant is more dangerous in the hand of a government then a hydrogen bomb, because hydrogen bombs don't go off when natural disaster strikes.
Hydrogen bombs and nuclear weapons, and most armarments in general, are designed so that a castrophic event disables them, not triggers them. Non upgraded old nuclear reactors cannot due this due to the lack of passive saftey.
Comparing nuclear reactors are to hydrogen bombs is like comparing is like comparing handgun ammo to anfo. Both are completely safe under standard conditions, but i'd be willing to bet that given catastrophic earthquakes, floods, hurricanes and the like, you'd see a higher accident rate with nuclear plants (and handgun ammo) than hydrogen bombs (and anfo)
Let's think about this another way.
Let's say right now, that a hard disk costs $300 for a 3TB drive. And helium tech allows the same drive to be made, almost free, for a capacity of 4TB. That's probably $100 aditional value seen by the consumer.
Right now if we say that the hard disk, with a good estimate, has about 10 cubic inches of 40 cubic inches of helium in the drive, and leaks 2 cubic inches per year.
At current helium prices, the price for a cubic foot of helium as far as I know is about $5. So you're paying $5 for 144 cubic inches of helium. So you're drive costs $5/77 or 10 cents a year to sustain. Let's say the hard drive has an average service life of 10 years.
That's about a dollar over the lifetime of the hard disk.
Now, if helium provides proportional gains over the conceivable lifetime of the hard disk technology, helium could go up 50x in price (pushing out MRI, welding, etc...) and STILL provide a massive economic advantage.
I'd also like to point out that if the average drive leaks 2 cubic inches per year, and 500 million drives are in service, they will consume 0.02% of the world wide helium consumption of 85 million cubic meters per year.
http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/helium/heliumcs06.pdf
Feel free to check/refute my numbers.
My best guess is that they'll have a low pressure sensor and a refill valve. A good seal should be good for several years, and topping back up on helium should be pretty trivial.
Helium is cheap. Atleast, in the quantities that would be used in hard disks. If each drive leaks a cubic inch per year, and you have 50,000 drives, you're probably looking at a 4000-6000$ recharge cost per year, just for the raw gas. Small price to pay for increased capacity and decreased volume per unit of capacity per disk.
This may be a dumb question, but isn't alot of the netherlands built on land that was flooded by rising sea levels? Is it impossible to just build a seawall where it's necessary?
I'm assuming this is a joke, but i'm doing the math because I enjoy challenges.
Melting the arctic ice would be nearly impossible with an icebreaker.
If we do a quick thought experiment, let's say that the ice is 1 meter thick (probably SEVERE lowball). This means that a 1 meter thick path, 200 meters wide, would contain 200 cubic meters per 1 meter of path.
Now let's extrude that into the (i'm guestimating here) 4000+ miles of Russian arctic coast. That comes out to 6000km. So you're path 200 meters wide would be roughly 1500 square kilometers of ice. That's 1,500,000,000 cubic meters of ice. This equates to 1.5 trillion liters of ice. That's about 3 trillion pounds of ice.
1.5 trillion liters of ice, assuming normal atmospheric temperature and pressure, is about 1.4 million KG of ice. Water ice takes about 334kj per killogram of ice to melt from 0 centigrade to 1 centrigrade. If we assume that ice breaker that generates 60MW electric, assuming 33% efficiency that's 180MW thermal. Assuming all of the heat energy from the reactor was 100% efficently transfered to the ice, melting that road through the arctic waters would take a relativley short 88 years and about 3 months. ...Yeah, and it refreezes every year.
This isn't something you can do with heat, in any meaningful timeframe for a reasonable cost.
I must admit, that I know absolutely nothing about working conditions in labor camps. However, I feel that the situations aren't directly comparable. At Foxconn, people are coming from the countryside, in their OWN country, from what I can imagine to be largely agricultural labor conditions. They're going to get a higher income. Nobody forced them to go there, there was an economic incentive to propel them to go there.
Not only that, Foxconn is DOUBLING the salary again.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2012/05/28/apples-foxconn-to-double-wages-again/
This would put the average Foxconn worker's salary at a very high level, in terms of living expenses and local prices this would probably be equivalent to a US auto factory worker, and about equal to what my mother is getting at her full time university position.
Even if labor conditions are poor, and overtime is rampant, they're still getting a before overtime salary double the agree'd minimum wage in the province, and will soon be getting quadruple it. Thus, most of your analogy (being 'stuck' somewhere, unable to finance moving to another job) is largely irrelevant to this discussion, and a poor parallel.
Well, I wasn't trying to use that article as a comment on foxconn's awesome wages, just a reference point to the actual current wage. I consider it to be pretty reasonable, considering my experiences with living costs in China. It'd certainley be an upgrade from the countryside. It's a living wage for sure.
Well, look at this article in the NYT.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/technology/foxconn-to-raise-salaries-for-workers-by-up-to-25.html
I was under the impression that we were talking about Foxconn regular emloyees salaries. The students, for sure, are getting a raw deal, but internships very rarely pay full salary. However, Foxconn's full employees seem to be getting quite decent wages for their work.
In my experience, if Foxconn is supplying them with free lodging and giving them subsidized food, $350/mo is roughly equivalent to $29,000 a year in America. Still pretty bad for having 60 hour work-weeks, but not outrageous for the country in question. Given that alot of the workers are probably coming from the countryside, i'd say most of them see it as an upgrade to their lifestyle as soon as they leave the corp and go back to their hometown with a years worth of decent wages saved up, would probably help them started a business or go to school.
My basis for this statement: Living in China for 5 years, and 2 trips back within the last 4.
You build the strategic reserve when there's a supply glut, so instead of crashing supply down to $2.5/pound, you keep it at 4. You're doing something wrong if supply is restricted enough for it to jump to 7 and 8, and probably aren't making as much as if you had enough supply to push it through at $4.
There's also this article, which points to fluctuations in yield year-by-year. If people are used to paying X amount, they might not like it if price gets jacked up to double that.
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/09/why-does-canada-have-a-strategic-maple-syrup-reserve/261869/
In the article it said that Japan and China were new markets. I don't know about China, but any foreign product in Japan is generally seen as a luxury item, and demands significantly higher price. Over here a pound block of sharp cheddar cheese can cost $15. (This is probably atleast 2x, if not 3x what it is back in the states.)
Using production during lulls in your demand in order to make sure you have product to sell while you're growing in certain markets, and keeping the supply stable, will probably help solidfy the notion that maple syrup is something you can introduce as a regular part of your life. It's kind of like hydro pumped storage. In China, due to the cost sensitivity, if suddenly maple syrup becomes unaffordable (imagine paying $60 for a bottle instead of $10. Some people can pay it, but many people might not), people might drop it and move on.
Keeping supplies steady and prices stable would probably help you move more product.
igloo box with icepacks? Enough and it should stay cool.
They say that fryer oil based bio diesel smells vaguely of fries. This slightly concerns me.. as sewage based bio diesel would smell like...