Well, you certainly come off like you were critical of the case when you say "her own clumsiness" and "ill-advised driving with it between her legs" (which isn't even factually correct)...
ust like the woman who burned herself on McD's super hot coffee through her own clumsiness and ill-advised driving with it between her legs didn't sue McD because they "sold coffee".
People like to trot out that case all the time as an example of a frivolous lawsuit, but having actually read the facts of the case, I'm not so quick to dismiss it.
On February 27, 1992, Stella Liebeck, a 79-year-old woman from Albuquerque, New Mexico, ordered a 49-cent cup of coffee from the drive-through window of a local McDonald's restaurant located at 5001 Gibson Boulevard S.E. Liebeck was in the passenger's seat of her grandson's Ford Probe, and her grandson Chris parked the car so that Liebeck could add cream and sugar to her coffee. Liebeck placed the coffee cup between her knees and pulled the far side of the lid toward her to remove it. In the process, she spilled the entire cup of coffee on her lap. Liebeck was wearing cotton sweatpants; they absorbed the coffee and held it against her skin, scalding her thighs, buttocks, and groin. Liebeck was taken to the hospital, where it was determined that she had suffered third-degree burns on six percent of her skin and lesser burns over sixteen percent. She remained in the hospital for eight days while she underwent skin grafting. During this period, Liebeck lost 20 pounds (9 kg, nearly 20% of her body weight), reducing her down to 83 pounds (38 kg). Two years of medical treatment followed.
Additionally, she only sued for $20,000 initially; $10,500 to cover current her medical expenses, anticipated medical expenses to the tune of $2,500, and an additional $5,000 for loss of income due to the amount of time she was out of work (she had third degree burns to her crotch, after all, how productive would any of us be with 3rd degree burns to our crotch?). It was only when McDonald's offered $800 and refused to budge an inch that she hired an attorney and he filed suit against them for gross negligence related to the temperature the coffee was being served at.
During the case, Liebeck's attorneys discovered that McDonald's required franchisees to serve coffee at 180–190 F (82–88 C). At that temperature, the coffee would cause a third-degree burn in two to seven seconds. Stella Liebeck's attorney argued that coffee should never be served hotter than 140 F (60 C), and that a number of other establishments served coffee at a substantially lower temperature than McDonald's. Liebeck's lawyers presented the jury with evidence that 180 F (82 C) coffee like that McDonald’s served may produce third-degree burns (where skin grafting is necessary) in about 12 to 15 seconds. Lowering the temperature to 160 F (71 C) would increase the time for the coffee to produce such a burn to 20 seconds. (A British court later rejected this argument as scientifically false, finding that 149 F (65 C) liquid could cause deep tissue damage in only two seconds.) Liebeck's attorneys argued that these extra seconds could provide adequate time to remove the coffee from exposed skin, thereby preventing many burns. McDonald's claimed that the reason for serving such hot coffee in its drive-through windows was that those who purchased the coffee typically were commuters who wanted to drive a distance with the coffee; the high initial temperature would keep the coffee hot during the trip. However, the company's own research showed that some customers intend to consume the coffee immediately while driving.
I don't know about you guys, but I've ordered coffee at McDonald's and gotten scalded on both my mouth and hands several times, it is served ridiculously hot, much hotter than coffee I have gotten pretty much anywhere else, certainly much hotter than the coffee that comes out of my own coffeepot here at home. Did it really need to be served at such a high temperature? Probably not, becaus
Even outside of that, we have old trusty, sneakernet.
I'm a part of an unofficial club that meets every couple weeks explicitly for the purposes of sharing media with each other. A handful of laptops and external hard drives and we're sharing hundreds of gigabytes of shit in a fraction of the time it would take for us all to torrent it ourselves. We've even somewhat specialized our focus to make it more efficient; I'm the music guy, we've got our movie and TV show guy, our game guy, our PC software guy, our Apple software guy (who's also getting tons of eBooks/eMagazines and shit for us now as well).
Until we get a fully P2P internet, it's the best option for us to minimize risk.
Every genre has it's good and bad. Listen to modern country music and tell me you don't find it just as shit-tier as hip-hop and I'm calling you a liar. She think's my tractor's sexy! Yee-fucking-HAW!!!!
Then of course there's The Bieb and Lady Gaga's garbage. And Guns 'n' Roses' and Van Halen's new garbage. And Metallica's garbage. And Skrillex's garbage...
It goes on and on. Hip-hop doesn't have a monopoly on shitty music at all...
I still don't understand why or how they allowed the 2005s to exist.
I believe the answer you're looking for is 'money'.
My dad owns like 6 copies of Dark Side of the Moon and The Wall by now, including multiple CD's. I bet they can sucker him into buying a couple more re-re-re-rereleases before he finally gets to the point where he's not ambulatory enough that I can stop him from doing that shit...
I'm always horrified when I see Youtube without adblock. It's one of the most popular sites on the 'net and it can put a popup advert across every video without losing any viewers?
Ditto. Whenever those friends and family try to show me Youtube videos and ads play I'm like "Why the hell are you living like this?!?!?!!?"
When I first installed Adblock Plus for my father it was like the scales fell from his eyes. Seeing his favorite pages (mostly major news sites, which tend to lay the fucking ads on thick) without all the bullshit was like a whole new internet for him. Now I just need to teach him how to use NoScript and we'll be good to go...
Still, though, I find a ridiculous number of people that don't use adblocking extensions. Some poor, misguided souls are still clinging to that "But, we have to watch their ads or they will take their website down!" nonsense, others think that adblock opens up roads for viruses and trojans to infect their computer. Where they got that ridiculous notion, I have no idea...
It's not like we don't have literally millions of entertainment sources.
But those 'millions of entertainment sources' are increasingly being owned by only a handful of players, and when you have only a handful of players in a given market, it's a lot more likely that Company A will increase their volume, which will lead to Company B and Company C doing the same, followed by Companies D-F, and then in a very short time everyone's got their ads that much louder. Than Company A increases theirs a little more and the cycle continues...
Major Record Labels, for instance, as soon as 1998 it was the 'Big Six': Warner Music Group, EMI, Sony Music, BMG, Universal Music Group, and Polygram. Then Polygram was absorbed by UMG. Then Sony and BMG combined. Now EMI is being absorbed by UMG. In just 15 years we've gone from 6 major labels to 3. So when Sony increases the loudness of all the tracks they produce, how long does it take for Warner and Universal to follow suit?
The free market only works well when there are enough choices out there in the first place. You can't "vote with your wallet" when everything is a subsidiary of a handful of companies because they're getting the money in the end anyway. This is a fundamental problem with this "let the free market handle it" problem that I haven't seen any of it's champions really address, so I'm really starting to wonder if you guys want to live in a future where the entire world is basically run by a handful of extra-national megacorporations that make everything from breakfast cereal to fucking spaceships, all while we pat ourselves on the back for not letting those damned "regulations" get in the way of that progress.
Pleasure Island. It wasn't really for the same reason retailers are pushing Christmas earlier and earlier, more a "every night it's New Years so let's all get smashed!" Plus they stopped doing it in 2005 (I hadn't been there since the late 90's and just learned that myself), and they closed it completely in 2008 due to declining attendance. Seeing as how it was a part of Disney World, and geared towards adults, I'm not surprised. The drinks at the various clubs all cost a freaking fortune even 15 years ago when I last attended...
I know, right? And when it loses power for one reason or another, does it just fall onto the top of the bare CPU it 'floats' above as it spins down? Boy, that sounds healthy for a CPU...
There are thing we can afford making, and there are others that we cannot (unless we change the nation's ethos with its hunger for the cheapest deals.)
But those 'cheapest deals' are artificially cheap, that's the problem. They're not based on actual cost because they ignore things like pollution and societal problems in 3rd world nations that result from externalizing these costs.
It's pretty much nothing but dumping on a global scale. We've addressed these issues before in the U.S., and have taken steps to combat it in the past, but it seems like once labor became the commodity being dumped, and not its resultant products, everyone become either blind or ignorant to it. At least, the people that actually have the power to change things (consumers).
If we taxed goods at a rate to reach parity with their actual cost of production, to include cost of future environmental clean-up, the human rights violations, etc, would it really be that much cheaper to produce it in China than to make it right here, at home, even with U.S. labor and environmental regulations? I seriously doubt it. As a country we really need to get our heads out of our asses on this point, because like it or not these costs are going to eventually effect us. If China is dumping toxins into their environment at record levels to ensure they're able to maintain their grip on our business contracts, those toxins are eventually going to migrate into our own environment. We can't escape it...all we can do is kick the can down the road for another generation and leave it for our kids to deal with. I mean, Jesus Christ, we have to be more enlightened then that, it's the 21st century for fuck's sake.
While we certainly could refuse to trade with places that don't follow our ideas of what is important, the problem is that other countries are also free to expect us to meet their idea of what is important.
The free market at work. If we do not meet their expectations, we do not need to have a business relationship with them. I see no issue there.
I know that is a simplistic view on the matter, but when you get right down to it, it's an ethical choice, and we're becoming, as a culture, pretty damned unethical when it comes to acknowledging these ancillary costs to externalization. It seems like a sizable number of people in this country couldn't give a shit less if Chinese people are flinging themselves off of buildings due to their dreary work conditions, so long as they're able to save another $20 on their fucking iPad. If those conditions were present here the public would be in an uproar...but it's out-of-sight, out-of-mind. Add in a helping of "as long as I'm not the one forced to work in those conditions I could give a shit less" that's so pervasive nowadays and I really don't see how we're going to pull ourselves out of this feedback loop. It's like everyone can see the writing on the wall, but they just keep on shopping at Walmart, buying foreign-made goods anyway.
It almost reminds me of the behavior of an abuse victim, to be honest. We know rationally that we're being abused, but don't know any other way to live so we just come up with excuses to justify it. "We have to relax our labor regulations, because if we don't they'll just send the jobs to China!" "We have to relax our environmental standards, because if we don't they'll just send the jobs to China!" It's like a fucking afterschool special about abusive relationships: "I have to have sex with my boyfriend, because if I don't he'll just leave me for some other girl who will!" When does it all end?
Lastly, things like environmental laws (which did not exist until the 1970s) have a huge impact. In the US, when an electronics manufacturer pollutes the groundwater, they are made to clean it up, and a huge cost. No so everywhere else in the world.
I'm hoping that I'm not picking up criticism of our environmental laws. There arenumerous examplesof what happens when there are no regulations concerning pollution. The only reason why these consumer goods are so cheap in China and elsewhere is because we've externalized all of these costs to societies where the average citizen has no power whatsoever to do anything about it.
If the U.S. enforced labor and environmental standards with its imports in the same way it regulated domestic production, we wouldn't be in this mess right now. The only reason any of that offshoring bullshit is possible is because we allow it to occur. The race to the bottom is completely unsustainable. Like I said, what happens when even China isn't cheap enough to manufacture our consumer crap? What happens when oil finally gets so scarce that the cost of bringing the shit here is prohibitive in itself? I refuse to believe that the only answer is "Well, we'll just have to get over this whole "clean air, land, and water thing, and be willing to work like a slave laborer" and that's precisely what I keep hearing needs to happen, especially by people that are financial secure enough that their own existence won't be tainted by that bullshit.
No! We must keep buying shit!!! Just put it on the credit card!!! Remember, everyone will make fun of you if you don't keep up with the Joneses. Material goods are how we measure success, after all.
This idea that we can't "afford" to make anything here anymore is ludicrous. For decades we managed to do so just fine, during our boom years of 1945-1980, when most everyone that was willing to work could find a decent paying job that afforded them a living wage. My grandfather drove a truck for a large portion of that period and was able to make enough money to buy a modest house, get a new car every couple years, support himself, his wife, and their four children, pile said kids into the woodie every summer for a road trip/vacation, and put something away for both his retirement and his kid's college educations. He didn't even get a high school diploma until his later life, having dropped out to enlist and do his duty.
What I want to know is what happens when even China isn't cheap enough to prop up those hyper-inflated executive salaries. What is the next area we're going to be exploiting? Africa, probably. Hell, all they'd have to do is not be murderous blood diamond warlords and the African people will probable weep tears of joy at the opportunity to poison themselves and their environment for 3 cents a day, and the "job creators" will talk up how goddamned benevolent it all is. By that point the US economy should be thoroughly dead and they'll just bring the sweatshops back home, and we will weep our own tears of joy at the opportunity to be slave laborers...
Slashdot Mirror
Well, you certainly come off like you were critical of the case when you say "her own clumsiness" and "ill-advised driving with it between her legs" (which isn't even factually correct)...
ust like the woman who burned herself on McD's super hot coffee through her own clumsiness and ill-advised driving with it between her legs didn't sue McD because they "sold coffee".
People like to trot out that case all the time as an example of a frivolous lawsuit, but having actually read the facts of the case, I'm not so quick to dismiss it.
From Wikipedia:
On February 27, 1992, Stella Liebeck, a 79-year-old woman from Albuquerque, New Mexico, ordered a 49-cent cup of coffee from the drive-through window of a local McDonald's restaurant located at 5001 Gibson Boulevard S.E. Liebeck was in the passenger's seat of her grandson's Ford Probe, and her grandson Chris parked the car so that Liebeck could add cream and sugar to her coffee. Liebeck placed the coffee cup between her knees and pulled the far side of the lid toward her to remove it. In the process, she spilled the entire cup of coffee on her lap. Liebeck was wearing cotton sweatpants; they absorbed the coffee and held it against her skin, scalding her thighs, buttocks, and groin. Liebeck was taken to the hospital, where it was determined that she had suffered third-degree burns on six percent of her skin and lesser burns over sixteen percent. She remained in the hospital for eight days while she underwent skin grafting. During this period, Liebeck lost 20 pounds (9 kg, nearly 20% of her body weight), reducing her down to 83 pounds (38 kg). Two years of medical treatment followed.
Additionally, she only sued for $20,000 initially; $10,500 to cover current her medical expenses, anticipated medical expenses to the tune of $2,500, and an additional $5,000 for loss of income due to the amount of time she was out of work (she had third degree burns to her crotch, after all, how productive would any of us be with 3rd degree burns to our crotch?). It was only when McDonald's offered $800 and refused to budge an inch that she hired an attorney and he filed suit against them for gross negligence related to the temperature the coffee was being served at.
During the case, Liebeck's attorneys discovered that McDonald's required franchisees to serve coffee at 180–190 F (82–88 C). At that temperature, the coffee would cause a third-degree burn in two to seven seconds. Stella Liebeck's attorney argued that coffee should never be served hotter than 140 F (60 C), and that a number of other establishments served coffee at a substantially lower temperature than McDonald's. Liebeck's lawyers presented the jury with evidence that 180 F (82 C) coffee like that McDonald’s served may produce third-degree burns (where skin grafting is necessary) in about 12 to 15 seconds. Lowering the temperature to 160 F (71 C) would increase the time for the coffee to produce such a burn to 20 seconds. (A British court later rejected this argument as scientifically false, finding that 149 F (65 C) liquid could cause deep tissue damage in only two seconds.) Liebeck's attorneys argued that these extra seconds could provide adequate time to remove the coffee from exposed skin, thereby preventing many burns. McDonald's claimed that the reason for serving such hot coffee in its drive-through windows was that those who purchased the coffee typically were commuters who wanted to drive a distance with the coffee; the high initial temperature would keep the coffee hot during the trip. However, the company's own research showed that some customers intend to consume the coffee immediately while driving.
I don't know about you guys, but I've ordered coffee at McDonald's and gotten scalded on both my mouth and hands several times, it is served ridiculously hot, much hotter than coffee I have gotten pretty much anywhere else, certainly much hotter than the coffee that comes out of my own coffeepot here at home. Did it really need to be served at such a high temperature? Probably not, becaus
Yeah, as opposed to masterpieces such as 'Purple Haze':
Purple haze all in my brain
Lately things just don't seem the same
Actin' funny, but I don't know why
'Scuse me while I kiss the sky
Purple haze all around
Don't know if I'm comin' up or down
Am I happy or in misery?
Whatever it is, that girl put a spell on me
Help me help me
Oh no no... no
Yeah
Purple haze all in my eyes
Don't know if it's day or night
You've got me blowin, blowin my mind
Is it tomorrow or just the end of time?
No, help me aw yeah! oh no no oh help me...
Poetry is subjective, obviously. And for the record, I like Jimi Hendrix, but let's not pretend there is any great poetic meaning there.
Even outside of that, we have old trusty, sneakernet.
I'm a part of an unofficial club that meets every couple weeks explicitly for the purposes of sharing media with each other. A handful of laptops and external hard drives and we're sharing hundreds of gigabytes of shit in a fraction of the time it would take for us all to torrent it ourselves. We've even somewhat specialized our focus to make it more efficient; I'm the music guy, we've got our movie and TV show guy, our game guy, our PC software guy, our Apple software guy (who's also getting tons of eBooks/eMagazines and shit for us now as well).
Until we get a fully P2P internet, it's the best option for us to minimize risk.
Hmm, not sure what the hell happened to my link, but I'll try again: http://www.tomsguide.com/us/BitTorrent-Sony-Pictures-TorrentFreak-Hollywood-Piracy,news-13521.html
You don't have to spoof shit, they already pirate shit just the same as everyone else.
Of course, that doesn't matter, this is only going to apply to the hoi polloi anyway.
Every genre has it's good and bad. Listen to modern country music and tell me you don't find it just as shit-tier as hip-hop and I'm calling you a liar. She think's my tractor's sexy! Yee-fucking-HAW!!!!
Then of course there's The Bieb and Lady Gaga's garbage. And Guns 'n' Roses' and Van Halen's new garbage. And Metallica's garbage. And Skrillex's garbage...
It goes on and on. Hip-hop doesn't have a monopoly on shitty music at all...
Or even better:
HEAD-ON! Apply directly to the forehead!!!
I still don't understand why or how they allowed the 2005s to exist.
I believe the answer you're looking for is 'money'.
My dad owns like 6 copies of Dark Side of the Moon and The Wall by now, including multiple CD's. I bet they can sucker him into buying a couple more re-re-re-rereleases before he finally gets to the point where he's not ambulatory enough that I can stop him from doing that shit...
Because mashing the fast-forward button requires too much physical effort. What is this, Wall-E?
You honestly think that the only way anything positive happens is as a result of regulations?
No, sometimes a company does the right and proper thing all on it's own.
By the way, can you pass me the crack pipe now? You've been holding it too long...
I'm always horrified when I see Youtube without adblock. It's one of the most popular sites on the 'net and it can put a popup advert across every video without losing any viewers?
Ditto. Whenever those friends and family try to show me Youtube videos and ads play I'm like "Why the hell are you living like this?!?!?!!?"
When I first installed Adblock Plus for my father it was like the scales fell from his eyes. Seeing his favorite pages (mostly major news sites, which tend to lay the fucking ads on thick) without all the bullshit was like a whole new internet for him. Now I just need to teach him how to use NoScript and we'll be good to go...
Still, though, I find a ridiculous number of people that don't use adblocking extensions. Some poor, misguided souls are still clinging to that "But, we have to watch their ads or they will take their website down!" nonsense, others think that adblock opens up roads for viruses and trojans to infect their computer. Where they got that ridiculous notion, I have no idea...
It's not like we don't have literally millions of entertainment sources.
But those 'millions of entertainment sources' are increasingly being owned by only a handful of players, and when you have only a handful of players in a given market, it's a lot more likely that Company A will increase their volume, which will lead to Company B and Company C doing the same, followed by Companies D-F, and then in a very short time everyone's got their ads that much louder. Than Company A increases theirs a little more and the cycle continues...
Major Record Labels, for instance, as soon as 1998 it was the 'Big Six': Warner Music Group, EMI, Sony Music, BMG, Universal Music Group, and Polygram. Then Polygram was absorbed by UMG. Then Sony and BMG combined. Now EMI is being absorbed by UMG. In just 15 years we've gone from 6 major labels to 3. So when Sony increases the loudness of all the tracks they produce, how long does it take for Warner and Universal to follow suit?
The free market only works well when there are enough choices out there in the first place. You can't "vote with your wallet" when everything is a subsidiary of a handful of companies because they're getting the money in the end anyway. This is a fundamental problem with this "let the free market handle it" problem that I haven't seen any of it's champions really address, so I'm really starting to wonder if you guys want to live in a future where the entire world is basically run by a handful of extra-national megacorporations that make everything from breakfast cereal to fucking spaceships, all while we pat ourselves on the back for not letting those damned "regulations" get in the way of that progress.
Pleasure Island. It wasn't really for the same reason retailers are pushing Christmas earlier and earlier, more a "every night it's New Years so let's all get smashed!" Plus they stopped doing it in 2005 (I hadn't been there since the late 90's and just learned that myself), and they closed it completely in 2008 due to declining attendance. Seeing as how it was a part of Disney World, and geared towards adults, I'm not surprised. The drinks at the various clubs all cost a freaking fortune even 15 years ago when I last attended...
There's an article?!
I know, right? And when it loses power for one reason or another, does it just fall onto the top of the bare CPU it 'floats' above as it spins down? Boy, that sounds healthy for a CPU...
Billions and billions of flies!!
[/Sagan]
There are thing we can afford making, and there are others that we cannot (unless we change the nation's ethos with its hunger for the cheapest deals.)
But those 'cheapest deals' are artificially cheap, that's the problem. They're not based on actual cost because they ignore things like pollution and societal problems in 3rd world nations that result from externalizing these costs.
It's pretty much nothing but dumping on a global scale. We've addressed these issues before in the U.S., and have taken steps to combat it in the past, but it seems like once labor became the commodity being dumped, and not its resultant products, everyone become either blind or ignorant to it. At least, the people that actually have the power to change things (consumers).
If we taxed goods at a rate to reach parity with their actual cost of production, to include cost of future environmental clean-up, the human rights violations, etc, would it really be that much cheaper to produce it in China than to make it right here, at home, even with U.S. labor and environmental regulations? I seriously doubt it. As a country we really need to get our heads out of our asses on this point, because like it or not these costs are going to eventually effect us. If China is dumping toxins into their environment at record levels to ensure they're able to maintain their grip on our business contracts, those toxins are eventually going to migrate into our own environment. We can't escape it...all we can do is kick the can down the road for another generation and leave it for our kids to deal with. I mean, Jesus Christ, we have to be more enlightened then that, it's the 21st century for fuck's sake.
While we certainly could refuse to trade with places that don't follow our ideas of what is important, the problem is that other countries are also free to expect us to meet their idea of what is important.
The free market at work. If we do not meet their expectations, we do not need to have a business relationship with them. I see no issue there.
I know that is a simplistic view on the matter, but when you get right down to it, it's an ethical choice, and we're becoming, as a culture, pretty damned unethical when it comes to acknowledging these ancillary costs to externalization. It seems like a sizable number of people in this country couldn't give a shit less if Chinese people are flinging themselves off of buildings due to their dreary work conditions, so long as they're able to save another $20 on their fucking iPad. If those conditions were present here the public would be in an uproar...but it's out-of-sight, out-of-mind. Add in a helping of "as long as I'm not the one forced to work in those conditions I could give a shit less" that's so pervasive nowadays and I really don't see how we're going to pull ourselves out of this feedback loop. It's like everyone can see the writing on the wall, but they just keep on shopping at Walmart, buying foreign-made goods anyway.
It almost reminds me of the behavior of an abuse victim, to be honest. We know rationally that we're being abused, but don't know any other way to live so we just come up with excuses to justify it. "We have to relax our labor regulations, because if we don't they'll just send the jobs to China!" "We have to relax our environmental standards, because if we don't they'll just send the jobs to China!" It's like a fucking afterschool special about abusive relationships: "I have to have sex with my boyfriend, because if I don't he'll just leave me for some other girl who will!" When does it all end?
Finally, a new banner for Wikipedia!!
Lastly, things like environmental laws (which did not exist until the 1970s) have a huge impact. In the US, when an electronics manufacturer pollutes the groundwater, they are made to clean it up, and a huge cost. No so everywhere else in the world.
I'm hoping that I'm not picking up criticism of our environmental laws. There are numerous examples of what happens when there are no regulations concerning pollution. The only reason why these consumer goods are so cheap in China and elsewhere is because we've externalized all of these costs to societies where the average citizen has no power whatsoever to do anything about it.
If the U.S. enforced labor and environmental standards with its imports in the same way it regulated domestic production, we wouldn't be in this mess right now. The only reason any of that offshoring bullshit is possible is because we allow it to occur. The race to the bottom is completely unsustainable. Like I said, what happens when even China isn't cheap enough to manufacture our consumer crap? What happens when oil finally gets so scarce that the cost of bringing the shit here is prohibitive in itself? I refuse to believe that the only answer is "Well, we'll just have to get over this whole "clean air, land, and water thing, and be willing to work like a slave laborer" and that's precisely what I keep hearing needs to happen, especially by people that are financial secure enough that their own existence won't be tainted by that bullshit.
No! We must keep buying shit!!! Just put it on the credit card!!! Remember, everyone will make fun of you if you don't keep up with the Joneses. Material goods are how we measure success, after all.
This idea that we can't "afford" to make anything here anymore is ludicrous. For decades we managed to do so just fine, during our boom years of 1945-1980, when most everyone that was willing to work could find a decent paying job that afforded them a living wage. My grandfather drove a truck for a large portion of that period and was able to make enough money to buy a modest house, get a new car every couple years, support himself, his wife, and their four children, pile said kids into the woodie every summer for a road trip/vacation, and put something away for both his retirement and his kid's college educations. He didn't even get a high school diploma until his later life, having dropped out to enlist and do his duty.
What I want to know is what happens when even China isn't cheap enough to prop up those hyper-inflated executive salaries. What is the next area we're going to be exploiting? Africa, probably. Hell, all they'd have to do is not be murderous blood diamond warlords and the African people will probable weep tears of joy at the opportunity to poison themselves and their environment for 3 cents a day, and the "job creators" will talk up how goddamned benevolent it all is. By that point the US economy should be thoroughly dead and they'll just bring the sweatshops back home, and we will weep our own tears of joy at the opportunity to be slave laborers...
The better question is how much more would they cost if we were paying the true cost of manufacturing, regardless of where it is being made...
You mean *gasp* it could have just been plain old fashioned greed and profiteering?!?! Well, knock me over with a feather!