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Rich Braun wrote: | ... | Thanks for the food for thought; here's a challenge for the rest of y'all: | look for electronic goods made outside China. Some examples: I have hard | drives from Thailand (in the news recently because of flooded factories), | cameras/camcorders from Japan (surprisingly rare now, most Japanese makers | have outsourced to China), a plasma TV from Mexico, UPS units from the | Philippines. Alas, I can't find PCs or laptops made anywhere but China. My | logic is this: even if those countries don't have better conditions, at least | the competition among nations will push them toward better conditions. Nah; probably not. There's nothing resembling international regulation, so the main effect of competition will be a "race to the bottom". The winners will be those with the lowest manufacturing costs, which primarily means that they can pay their workers less than anyone else. If local pressures force them to increase their pay rates, they'll then lose out to someone else that can still pay less. This will continue until the workers can all be replaced with machines that don't need to be paid. Machines do need power in some form, which puts a lower limit on their cost. And a few workers are needed to maintain the machines. But the nearly worker-free manufacturing plants in Japan and a few other countries suggest what might be the final, steady-state development of our manufacturing processes, not too far in the future. We're already reading reports of manufacturing moving out of China, due to increasing labor costs, to other countries full of people living in abject poverty who are (for a while) happy to have the jobs at wages barely above the starvation level. -- Give someone a program, frustrate them for a day. Teach someone to program, frustrate them for a lifetime. _' O <:#/> John Chambers + <jc at trillian.mit.edu> /#\ <jc1742 at gmail.com> | |
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