And the products are also designed in China, assembled in China, QC tested in China, and have no parts made anywhere else?
Many "American" companies are now just shells- designers & importers that sell to retailers, nothing more. This has been going on for 40 years now- the slow de-industrialization of America. You can make parts in Mexico too- if you're willing to pay 2-4x as much for labor.
There is nothing on the linked page to suggest that any of the products had anything to do with China at all.
So? You can't do a little research into the state of American Manufacturing? Or have you missed the 40 years of articles warning about this danger?
Assuming they do, how can you be sure the particular failures were down to Chinese component manufacturing?
Because nobody else makes components anymore- low cost cheap labor is the winner, it's the race to the bottom. How do you justify spending $1/hr in Mexico to your stockholders when you could be spending $.60/hr, or even $0.24/hr? Let alone $9/hr for quality control once you get the shipping container back from Mexico? It's far cheaper overall to do these recalls when the customer finds a problem, at least from the point of view of so-called "American" companies (whom I call, free traitors- they're taking money and selling out the American consumer & worker in their search for cheap labor).
Just remember that enacting such barriers WILL cost the end-consumer. There's no way to get around the differences between a minimum wage of $8/hr, a minimum wage of $0.32/hr, or an unionized employee's $15/hr wages. Want worker protections? We're going to have to pay. On the other hand, paying this way means more people to buy YOUR products as well. None of us are making anything cheap.
You fail to mention that EVERY ONE of those "American companies" buy parts from China- and it's the shoddy, non-unionized workmanship that is failing.
And that the Mattel recall (another American company that hired the Chinese toy company) also covered a heck of a lot more than one product- the recall was 5 PDF pages with pictures of hundreds of different products.
I wonder if the producer of all of those red & yellow Thomas the Tank Engines also killed himself? Or how about the Million Pounds of Fish intended for human consumption that was subject to an import alert this week?
I'm not sure- I tried it while I was unemployed for 2 years in the early part of the decade- for my customers, the cost of setting up their computers and LANs and broadband connections dropped to half what the professionals charged. Funny though, I couldn't afford housing or food on that....
Easy- start buying the products that are $5000 instead of $500....that is, the ones that you can verify were made in the USA out of components created from raw materials in the USA.
Actually you have it backwards, the real-time shift of wealth goes from the creditor to the borrower. The creditor is the one taking the risk since it is their capital that is being borrowed.
I'll give you that one- I did have it backwards. The creditor gets the ownership, and therefore the control.
Or that a giant meteor doesn't hit the earth.
Far more likely that the WTO will target your industry, just like they've targeted Textiles, TV sets, VCRs, magnets, etc. Their entire aim is to sell off the United States one group of jobs at a time.
Should I not get a job, because afterall the company could go under the next day and I don't get paid. Life is full of risk, the key to be successful is finding the right mix of risk vs reward.
A PROPERLY engineered system minimizes risk by minimizing chaos. Only a very bad engineer could support chaos.
Services have always been part of the economic activity. At this point in time they are more valuable.
If they're more valuable, why do they pay so much less?
WHen in the future everybody in CHina and India is doing services and there are no countries left wanting to do manufacturing, then manufacturing will come back in vogue and the most flexible countries will enrich from the new trend.
In other words, the real choice is to entrust our future to the whims of other countries, or to take control and say "No, we will not allow international trade to harm us". I'm for the second- why are you for the first? Do you like being a slave?
Services is not nothing, their are activities with a real economic value.
Debt is a timeshift of wealth and allows the purchase of capital which can reap more rewards in the future.
And since nobody can foretell the future, there is NO guarantee that the purchase of capital will reap more rewards in the future. Since there is no such guarantee, basically it becomes a realtime shift of ownership from the borrower to the creditor.
There is a big difference between borrowing to buy something, and borrowing to make a capital investment.
Only if you are 100% certain that the capital investment won't be undermined by, say, a new international treaty that sends your entire industry overseas.
If you borrow to allow yourself to make more money that's a good thing. For example borrowing money to buy a computer and start your own business, or borrowing to pay for your education.
Actually, I found that in both cases that was a fallacy- because neither a computer, your own business, nor an education can guarantee that you'll make more money than you borrowed. A sudden shift in the industry ends up leaving you with tens of thousands of dollars of credit card debt, and neither business nor job to pay for it. Some would say that's what bankruptcy laws are for- but in 2001 they redid the bankruptcy laws that means you have to pay that money back regardless.
If you forget the wisdom of your ancestors, which was won by fighting through history, then it is the same as forgetting the history itself. If I had followed Polonius's advice during the.com era, I'd be a relatively rich man by now. I didn't, so instead it will be another year before I'm done with the credit counseling service.
And I see the same thing happening with American businesses that expand faster than their means, and certainly with the American government that seems to think Chinese Savings Accounts grow on trees and can be borrowed from indefinitely. We're all a bunch of idiots to borrow in the first place. And that includes any brilliant software company that is stupid enough to go public and borrow money from investors.
Individual debt is not needed to survive, the problem is individuals learning to manage their budgets.
Then why do 75% of college students take more than 10 years to pay off their school loans?
Debt is necessary for economic expansion and is not necessarily a bad thing.
WRONG. Debt is fake economic expansion that carries with it the forces that create depressions and the downswing of the business cycle. Debt is an evil that should NEVER be used, by anybody. After all, as you said above, the problem is individuals who can't manage a budget. That's the only reason anybody ever goes into debt- because they're trying to live beyond their means.
Basically your proposals are to abandon all the ideals that the country was founded upon.
Those ideals were abandoned the day we signed NAFTA.
The same "sustainability" argument has been used in various forms for hundreds of years, technology and social changes have overcome the issues time & time again.
It's the second that I fear the most. Social changes is just a code word for depression and war.
This would imply that employment would be dropping rapidly in developed countries (Not true, actually on the downswing)
No, that would imply that employment in developed countries would be ending manufacturing and agriculture, and being replaced with SERVICE jobs (since all goods are produced elsewhere). Which is actually the case.
and economic growth would be negative in richer countries(Once again, not observed).
Depends on the segment you're looking at. If you remove multinational corporations from the equation and look only at domestic industries creating domestic goods for domestic consumers, you'll observe negative economic growth. In fact, you'll observe total economic destruction.
Most of all, it would imply that the poorest countries have the lowest levels of unemployment (once again, unobserved).
India has the lowest level of unemployment today among call center workers, China has low unemployment. If you're not observing this, you're blind.
It certainly seems like it would be better for everyone, Americans do not become poor, and Africans become rich.
Bullshit- the multinational corporations become rich and everybody else becomes wage slaves.
A single number can never reliably measure a statistical distribution. Back then, entire continents were devoid of any sort of wealth.
Incorrect- the continents had wealth, just unexploited by your multinational corporate masters who are trying to profit from the exploitation of workers.
Your suggestions entail the complete destruction of the most developed economy in the world.
No empire lasts forever- and free trade is in the process of destroying this one.
Unless your explicit goal is destruction, I don't think this is necessary.
Actually, my explicit goal is construction- construction of a self-sufficient America that doesn't need to involve itself in foreign resource wars because we live within our means on manufactured goods that are designed and built in America for Americans. But of course, that's to hard for the Free Traitors who are addicted to cheap labor and "comparative advantage".
I don't want to nitpick, but around 800 million people live on less than a dollar a day, and in many of those places, money equivalents come from aid and farming. Not that it is pleasant or acceptable, but I felt that it needed to be pointed out. And if we are all reverting to a global average, the GDP per capita of the world is between 7-10 thousand a year(depending on how you define GDP), coming out to about $28 dollars a day.
The trouble is, we're not reverting to the global average, but rather the race to the bottom- the cheapest labor gets the jobs, regardless of what the job is or what the skill level is.
And I don't see how the Gold standard and income inequality are related, the world has a much more egalitarian distribution of money now then we did back when the Gold standard were around.
Only if you think 2% of the population owning 98% of the resources is egalitarian. As opposed to 25% of the population owning 75% of the world's resources- as it was back in 1900.
And finally, wouldn't it be better to bring the rest of the world to our standard of living then vice versa?
Depends on who you are- it would be better for them, but it's not better for the multinational corporations that own it all and control the strings.
Contrary to communist belief, we are not rich off of their exploitation and poverty, but because of a lack of development. Most of the third world is growing at a more rapid rate then the west (Essentially all of Asia, most of Latin America, a couple of bright spots in Africa), so they will catch up with us eventually.
Not if the race to the cheapest labor encouraged by cheap credit and fiat currency continues. Then, in that scenario, they get just developed enough to provide services, then their factories get raided as soon as wages begin to increase to move the machinery to the next cheap labor nation. If we're ever going to get our manufacturing capability back, we're going to have to provide a workforce that can live as cheaply as theirs do.
Farms? Agriculture makes up less than 1% of GDP. There is no shortage of food in this country, as a college student my food budget was $3 dollars a day, anyone can obtain that. It would not be farmers who would be missed, but Doctors, Engineers, Programmers, Professors, every skilled worker in the country.
For 3 billion people on this planet, their income is less than $1/day, 1/3rd of what us Americans need to merely buy food. That's the point we will need to get to if we're going to have jobs again- that's who we are competing with. The Doctors, Engineers, Programmers, Professors and skilled workers are luxuries we can only afford by borrowing money against the future.
Explain why this collapse is inevitable?
The collapse is inevitable because eventually, the banks will get wise to the fact that using inflation to erase debt is the equivalent of a default on the loan anyway, and stop lending us the money that we use to run this country. At that point, skilled workers who don't have basic survival skills will need to move to China or India- because Europe and America will be third world nations, unable to afford those skills.
Isolationism, with the corresponding compression of our own economy, default on foreign loans, and rebuilding of our own agricultural and industrial capability that represents. After a period of time, when we can afford it, slowly rejoining the international community as equals (for the destruction of our economy will make us a third world nation), trading in barter rather than in money, only those goods we have in surplus and only for those natural resources that we don't have sources of within America. And never again expand our trade past that.
This means we'll have to start teaching people to live only within their means- no credit (not that the isolationism won't take care of that anyway with deflation of prices and interest rates shooting through the roof). And as a country, we're going to have to reduce our population to the carrying capacity of the land (about 2/3rds what it is now)- but good isolationism will do that anyway as we lose the population replenishment of 3 million new immigrants a year. It will be PAINFUL. But it's either do it now, ourselves, on our own terms, or do it later when we have 600 million citizens and are dependent upon third world farmers for every morsel of food available.
Or rather, why nobody listens to Shakespeare. After all, this little nugget of economic wisdom comes to us from not Marx, but from Polonius' advice to Laertes. I'm hardly the first to say it.
A necessary step towards the gold standard is solving the imbalance of worldwide standard of living. Somehow you're going to have to get the below-average American workers to accept the same $1/day (and live on that) that 3 billion other below-average workers receive. That is going to take some SERIOUS deflation in prices.
Which is why inflation helps them, since in that environment the value of debt decreases.
But since one needs increased debt to survive, the debt amount goes up anyway. It's completely unsustainable in the long run- we'd be better off biting the bullet and taking the depression now, when it might be managable, than later. And learning the lesson to NEVER BORROW AGAIN.
Slashdot Mirror
And the products are also designed in China, assembled in China, QC tested in China, and have no parts made anywhere else?
Many "American" companies are now just shells- designers & importers that sell to retailers, nothing more. This has been going on for 40 years now- the slow de-industrialization of America. You can make parts in Mexico too- if you're willing to pay 2-4x as much for labor.
There is nothing on the linked page to suggest that any of the products had anything to do with China at all.
So? You can't do a little research into the state of American Manufacturing? Or have you missed the 40 years of articles warning about this danger?
Assuming they do, how can you be sure the particular failures were down to Chinese component manufacturing?
Because nobody else makes components anymore- low cost cheap labor is the winner, it's the race to the bottom. How do you justify spending $1/hr in Mexico to your stockholders when you could be spending $.60/hr, or even $0.24/hr? Let alone $9/hr for quality control once you get the shipping container back from Mexico? It's far cheaper overall to do these recalls when the customer finds a problem, at least from the point of view of so-called "American" companies (whom I call, free traitors- they're taking money and selling out the American consumer & worker in their search for cheap labor).
Yep, they just won $25,000 from Microsoft for Reinventing the wheel!. I first saw this technology demonstrated on the TI99/4a in 1979- 28 years ago!
Just remember that enacting such barriers WILL cost the end-consumer. There's no way to get around the differences between a minimum wage of $8/hr, a minimum wage of $0.32/hr, or an unionized employee's $15/hr wages. Want worker protections? We're going to have to pay. On the other hand, paying this way means more people to buy YOUR products as well. None of us are making anything cheap.
You fail to mention that EVERY ONE of those "American companies" buy parts from China- and it's the shoddy, non-unionized workmanship that is failing.
And that the Mattel recall (another American company that hired the Chinese toy company) also covered a heck of a lot more than one product- the recall was 5 PDF pages with pictures of hundreds of different products.
I wonder if the producer of all of those red & yellow Thomas the Tank Engines also killed himself? Or how about the Million Pounds of Fish intended for human consumption that was subject to an import alert this week?
I missed that- that's a damn good deal in comparison to Ohio Arts employees, putting together etch-a-sketches for $0.24/hr.....
I'm not sure- I tried it while I was unemployed for 2 years in the early part of the decade- for my customers, the cost of setting up their computers and LANs and broadband connections dropped to half what the professionals charged. Funny though, I couldn't afford housing or food on that....
Too bad unions are illegal in China. Unionization was what it took to change that in the United States.
Easy- start buying the products that are $5000 instead of $500....that is, the ones that you can verify were made in the USA out of components created from raw materials in the USA.
He's done so without attempting to poison or kill his own customers.
Voltron is now on Cartoon Network in the very early mornings- I was stupid enough to add it to my Beyond TV shows at one point....
Actually you have it backwards, the real-time shift of wealth goes from the creditor to the borrower. The creditor is the one taking the risk since it is their capital that is being borrowed.
I'll give you that one- I did have it backwards. The creditor gets the ownership, and therefore the control.
Or that a giant meteor doesn't hit the earth.
Far more likely that the WTO will target your industry, just like they've targeted Textiles, TV sets, VCRs, magnets, etc. Their entire aim is to sell off the United States one group of jobs at a time.
Should I not get a job, because afterall the company could go under the next day and I don't get paid. Life is full of risk, the key to be successful is finding the right mix of risk vs reward.
A PROPERLY engineered system minimizes risk by minimizing chaos. Only a very bad engineer could support chaos.
Services have always been part of the economic activity. At this point in time they are more valuable.
If they're more valuable, why do they pay so much less?
WHen in the future everybody in CHina and India is doing services and there are no countries left wanting to do manufacturing, then manufacturing will come back in vogue and the most flexible countries will enrich from the new trend.
In other words, the real choice is to entrust our future to the whims of other countries, or to take control and say "No, we will not allow international trade to harm us". I'm for the second- why are you for the first? Do you like being a slave?
Services is not nothing, their are activities with a real economic value.
Then why do they all pay minimum wage?
Debt is a timeshift of wealth and allows the purchase of capital which can reap more rewards in the future.
And since nobody can foretell the future, there is NO guarantee that the purchase of capital will reap more rewards in the future. Since there is no such guarantee, basically it becomes a realtime shift of ownership from the borrower to the creditor.
There is a big difference between borrowing to buy something, and borrowing to make a capital investment.
Only if you are 100% certain that the capital investment won't be undermined by, say, a new international treaty that sends your entire industry overseas.
If you borrow to allow yourself to make more money that's a good thing. For example borrowing money to buy a computer and start your own business, or borrowing to pay for your education.
Actually, I found that in both cases that was a fallacy- because neither a computer, your own business, nor an education can guarantee that you'll make more money than you borrowed. A sudden shift in the industry ends up leaving you with tens of thousands of dollars of credit card debt, and neither business nor job to pay for it. Some would say that's what bankruptcy laws are for- but in 2001 they redid the bankruptcy laws that means you have to pay that money back regardless.
If you forget the wisdom of your ancestors, which was won by fighting through history, then it is the same as forgetting the history itself. If I had followed Polonius's advice during the .com era, I'd be a relatively rich man by now. I didn't, so instead it will be another year before I'm done with the credit counseling service.
And I see the same thing happening with American businesses that expand faster than their means, and certainly with the American government that seems to think Chinese Savings Accounts grow on trees and can be borrowed from indefinitely. We're all a bunch of idiots to borrow in the first place. And that includes any brilliant software company that is stupid enough to go public and borrow money from investors.
Individual debt is not needed to survive, the problem is individuals learning to manage their budgets.
Then why do 75% of college students take more than 10 years to pay off their school loans?
Debt is necessary for economic expansion and is not necessarily a bad thing.
WRONG. Debt is fake economic expansion that carries with it the forces that create depressions and the downswing of the business cycle. Debt is an evil that should NEVER be used, by anybody. After all, as you said above, the problem is individuals who can't manage a budget. That's the only reason anybody ever goes into debt- because they're trying to live beyond their means.
Basically your proposals are to abandon all the ideals that the country was founded upon.
Those ideals were abandoned the day we signed NAFTA.
The same "sustainability" argument has been used in various forms for hundreds of years, technology and social changes have overcome the issues time & time again.
It's the second that I fear the most. Social changes is just a code word for depression and war.
This would imply that employment would be dropping rapidly in developed countries (Not true, actually on the downswing)
No, that would imply that employment in developed countries would be ending manufacturing and agriculture, and being replaced with SERVICE jobs (since all goods are produced elsewhere). Which is actually the case.
and economic growth would be negative in richer countries(Once again, not observed).
Depends on the segment you're looking at. If you remove multinational corporations from the equation and look only at domestic industries creating domestic goods for domestic consumers, you'll observe negative economic growth. In fact, you'll observe total economic destruction.
Most of all, it would imply that the poorest countries have the lowest levels of unemployment (once again, unobserved).
India has the lowest level of unemployment today among call center workers, China has low unemployment. If you're not observing this, you're blind.
It certainly seems like it would be better for everyone, Americans do not become poor, and Africans become rich.
Bullshit- the multinational corporations become rich and everybody else becomes wage slaves.
A single number can never reliably measure a statistical distribution. Back then, entire continents were devoid of any sort of wealth.
Incorrect- the continents had wealth, just unexploited by your multinational corporate masters who are trying to profit from the exploitation of workers.
Your suggestions entail the complete destruction of the most developed economy in the world.
No empire lasts forever- and free trade is in the process of destroying this one.
Unless your explicit goal is destruction, I don't think this is necessary.
Actually, my explicit goal is construction- construction of a self-sufficient America that doesn't need to involve itself in foreign resource wars because we live within our means on manufactured goods that are designed and built in America for Americans. But of course, that's to hard for the Free Traitors who are addicted to cheap labor and "comparative advantage".
I don't want to nitpick, but around 800 million people live on less than a dollar a day, and in many of those places, money equivalents come from aid and farming. Not that it is pleasant or acceptable, but I felt that it needed to be pointed out. And if we are all reverting to a global average, the GDP per capita of the world is between 7-10 thousand a year(depending on how you define GDP), coming out to about $28 dollars a day.
The trouble is, we're not reverting to the global average, but rather the race to the bottom- the cheapest labor gets the jobs, regardless of what the job is or what the skill level is.
And I don't see how the Gold standard and income inequality are related, the world has a much more egalitarian distribution of money now then we did back when the Gold standard were around.
Only if you think 2% of the population owning 98% of the resources is egalitarian. As opposed to 25% of the population owning 75% of the world's resources- as it was back in 1900.
And finally, wouldn't it be better to bring the rest of the world to our standard of living then vice versa?
Depends on who you are- it would be better for them, but it's not better for the multinational corporations that own it all and control the strings.
Contrary to communist belief, we are not rich off of their exploitation and poverty, but because of a lack of development. Most of the third world is growing at a more rapid rate then the west (Essentially all of Asia, most of Latin America, a couple of bright spots in Africa), so they will catch up with us eventually.
Not if the race to the cheapest labor encouraged by cheap credit and fiat currency continues. Then, in that scenario, they get just developed enough to provide services, then their factories get raided as soon as wages begin to increase to move the machinery to the next cheap labor nation. If we're ever going to get our manufacturing capability back, we're going to have to provide a workforce that can live as cheaply as theirs do.
Farms? Agriculture makes up less than 1% of GDP. There is no shortage of food in this country, as a college student my food budget was $3 dollars a day, anyone can obtain that. It would not be farmers who would be missed, but Doctors, Engineers, Programmers, Professors, every skilled worker in the country.
For 3 billion people on this planet, their income is less than $1/day, 1/3rd of what us Americans need to merely buy food. That's the point we will need to get to if we're going to have jobs again- that's who we are competing with. The Doctors, Engineers, Programmers, Professors and skilled workers are luxuries we can only afford by borrowing money against the future.
Explain why this collapse is inevitable?
The collapse is inevitable because eventually, the banks will get wise to the fact that using inflation to erase debt is the equivalent of a default on the loan anyway, and stop lending us the money that we use to run this country. At that point, skilled workers who don't have basic survival skills will need to move to China or India- because Europe and America will be third world nations, unable to afford those skills.
Isolationism, with the corresponding compression of our own economy, default on foreign loans, and rebuilding of our own agricultural and industrial capability that represents. After a period of time, when we can afford it, slowly rejoining the international community as equals (for the destruction of our economy will make us a third world nation), trading in barter rather than in money, only those goods we have in surplus and only for those natural resources that we don't have sources of within America. And never again expand our trade past that.
This means we'll have to start teaching people to live only within their means- no credit (not that the isolationism won't take care of that anyway with deflation of prices and interest rates shooting through the roof). And as a country, we're going to have to reduce our population to the carrying capacity of the land (about 2/3rds what it is now)- but good isolationism will do that anyway as we lose the population replenishment of 3 million new immigrants a year. It will be PAINFUL. But it's either do it now, ourselves, on our own terms, or do it later when we have 600 million citizens and are dependent upon third world farmers for every morsel of food available.
Or rather, why nobody listens to Shakespeare. After all, this little nugget of economic wisdom comes to us from not Marx, but from Polonius' advice to Laertes. I'm hardly the first to say it.
A necessary step towards the gold standard is solving the imbalance of worldwide standard of living. Somehow you're going to have to get the below-average American workers to accept the same $1/day (and live on that) that 3 billion other below-average workers receive. That is going to take some SERIOUS deflation in prices.
I wasn't aware that posix-compliant restricted actual improvements in accuracy.
Which is why inflation helps them, since in that environment the value of debt decreases.
But since one needs increased debt to survive, the debt amount goes up anyway. It's completely unsustainable in the long run- we'd be better off biting the bullet and taking the depression now, when it might be managable, than later. And learning the lesson to NEVER BORROW AGAIN.