Carcano
Valued Senior Member
Nice try...www.youtube.com/watch?v=yF8jUDzz5bE
Americans may have to get used to a slow-growth economy, WHY
- Thread starter Buddha12
- Start date
At 2:50 into your link (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yF8jUDzz5bE) they do give August 2000 as the date. Back then China did still have some labor cheap enough to compete with other Asian nations making toys and had long established contracts with western toy company customers.
It is very unlikely that many of those old sweat shop still exist in China now. That was a decade before China allowed the peasant farmers to lease "their" small farms to agri-corporations. Back then the farm children really had no choice but to go to the coastal export factories and be exploited in the sweat shops exporting toys and plastic junk to the west.
Now their wages are growing so rapidly (25 to 30% annually) that all most all the old sweat shops have closed. For example, the world´s largest producer of consumer electronics, can no longer afford the high wages workers can demand, so Foxconn is installing 100,000 production line robots. A little more than a year ago, Foxconn moved two coastal production factories to the interior as even 30+ % annual increases in salaries, better food in company cafeterias, etc.* do not attract enough workers from the inland to the coastal areas.
A large part of China´s GDP is the investments in infrastructure in the "go west" program especially. Building the world´s largest net work of railroads, a new power plant every 10 days, dams, 100 new (or refurbished) cities in this and next 5 year plan, large cross China pipelines, etc. have created many jobs in the interior.
SUMMARY: China no longer has cheap labor exploited in sweat shops. China has moved up on the value added chain. China imports from the still low nations cost (Vietnam, Thiland, etc.) the simple items (resistors, small fans, etc.) it builds into its high valued added exports. This is giving them Yuan with which they increasing buy Chinese products. In 2011, China´s trade with the S.E. Asian Association Nations increased more than 50%!
This video is only a few years old and reflects the changes that have taken place (and are still occurring) in China´s factories. It starts with this text:
“Change is sweeping through China's workshops and factories, where workers' demands are growing as they realise their value to employers and the Chinese economy. …”
Watch it at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BqGmCq0hUBk&feature=related
* Foxconn dorms typically had 6 to 12 late teenage girls sleeping in double or triple bunk beds in one small bedroom. When they had problems with suicides, one of the improvement they offered to reduce depression (and to keep employees), was more private bedrooms. None of the girls wanted to sleep alone - they did not feel safe and this was strange idea to these peasant girls, who all their lives had slept in one room with the rest of the family.
In inland hotels (for traveling Chinese, not westerners) all the guests sleep side-by-side with strangers on a platform which is about a yard above the floor. In winter hot air from a fire circulates under the platform. Giving these girls their own bed room, as many US teenage girls use, would have increased the suicide rate!
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What does any of this have to do with the topic?
You've said all these things a million times already. Try to come up with something relevant to say, instead of working relentlessly to turn every thread into a regurgitation of your same old rhetoric.
It is reply to others (first Jeeves then Carcano) Jeeves has admitted part of his post I corrected was in error. (I often correct errors.)
In any case, even if not just replies, fact taht nations which once lead the world and had their currency universally accepted, do need to adjust to lower living standards (relative to others, if not absolute, due to technology and medical advances), so post showing this adjustment is coming to US with rise of China is very much on thread.
Which were only tangentially related to the topic in the first place - and once you jumped in with your ready-made jeremyad, the topic was lost entirely. And this is a regular pattern with you, for a long time now.
Not as often as you make them, though.
Let me reiterate the basic fact of netiquette that one off-topic post does not justify another. The fact that somebody else went off-topic first is no excuse for contributing to a derail - especially for the subforum moderator. Keeping threads on-topic is your responsibility.
That is not the thread topic. The thread topic is about a "slow-growth economy." That doesn't imply anything about "lowered living standards." The OP was a comparison between the American and Japanese responses to banking crises - something you have not addressed at all.
The fact of the matter is that some other internet ranter said something about China, and you - as always - took it as the opportunity you were waiting for to derail another thread into your pet China fantasies. This got old years ago. How about you stop treating this forum as your personal blog, and instead try to act like a competent moderator? You don't even have anything new to say about your silly fantasy, nor do you even make much effort to relate actual thread contents to it - you simply change the subject to your pre-existing scripts as quickly as possible. It's an embarassment.
Thanks, Billy T
So that would be a resounding NO - they won't do it better; they're going the same stupid destructive industrial route. That means, in 20-30 years, they'll hit the same wall. Too bad.
Sorry Quadraphonics, for the derailment ... not so much for the rant.
So that would be a resounding NO - they won't do it better; they're going the same stupid destructive industrial route. That means, in 20-30 years, they'll hit the same wall. Too bad.
Sorry Quadraphonics, for the derailment ... not so much for the rant.
Perhaps not. China is leading world now in installing solar systems (all three forms: wind, hydro-electric dams and solar cells). Also thanks to their "one child" policy their population will actually be decreasing in 25 years. I.e. China is trying for a sustainable economy eventually.
Still off-topic, and a gross misrepresentation of the situation - and economic basics - as usual.
It is not your responsibility to keep threads on topic, nor do you exhibit any fixed agenda that you work to derail threads onto. So, there's nothing for you to apologize for.
spidergoat
Valued Senior Member
It's not slow-growth we have to get used to, but actual contraction.
Guess where all of the clothing, merchandise and other stuff that American Olympic team members and memorabilia is being made....CHINA! That's another billion dollars headed out of American workers pockets, WHY? A famous designer and clothe maker here in America was asked if she could have done the design and made the clothes for less and she said YES! What's going on with those people that are supposed to be promoting American products at the Olympics anyway, are they now CHINESE?:shrug:
Is that actually true? I would have guessed Vietnam or Indonesia for most of the clothing, actually.
kmguru
Staff member
It is a bad investment and Banking industry does not know what is good verses bad...since our Economists do not know that either....and our Lawyer Leaders are in the same boat...hence the issues...
kmguru
Staff member
Well India could have done it...but Indians are doing basically what Spain, Italy and perhaps Greece do these days...
kmguru
Staff member
India and USA need to learn this too...
http://economyincrisis.org/content/favoring-china
and Learn what is happening...
http://economyincrisis.org/content/china-city-u-s-a
http://economyincrisis.org/content/favoring-china
and Learn what is happening...
http://economyincrisis.org/content/china-city-u-s-a
This is a misnomer. IT means our economy can grow basically indefinitely. We haven't even scratched the surface of what the planet can do for us. We've just been managing our resources really poorly. Beyond that, cultural evidence would suggest that the world population will soon be declining (soon is probably a misnomer, I think the estimate for the tipping point was something like 2040)
The notion of something being beyond human understanding is not scientific. It's not even something difficult, like immortality or what comes after death. It's a human creation.
Social constructs are the will of humans; not of particular humans, necessarily, but humanity as a whole. It's a case of socio-natural selection. Societies that don't have these things fade away (with the exception of perhaps churches). Stripping away the power of armies would only result in a group of armed individuals taking power for themselves. That's why armies exist; to protect the interests of their subjects. I think it was Lee who said;
"It is well war is so terrible, lest we should grow too fond of it."
That was basically the whole principle behind Mutually Assured Destruction. When your opponent can kill you, there's much more incentive to negotiate, whereas if you're unarmed, your opponent is much more likely to shoot you and raid your larder.
Churches are a bit different. I fall on the side of the fence that it's a cognitive need for humans to believe in something, because that something provides consistency. Being told God is "always there" for you means there is a constant. Something you will never have to worry about. I, and I'm sure many on this forum, know God as "Truth", that is, Empirical Evidence. I am put at ease when I understand something; order among chaos. Congregating to share Empirical Evidence (like at a conference) is kind of similar to the congregation one would experience at church. Sure, people use influence in churches (often times even malevolently), but it happens in almost every social institution (for example, even something as formal as Congress usually operates on a "you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours" kind of situation). You might be interested in reading some psychology or sociology books on the topic... Reciprocity plays a big role as I recall from my brief lessons in psych...
Corporations and banks are a bit more artificial but the concept is based on the sociology of humans, that is, pooling resources and working together (not always for the betterment of humanity in general, but most likely for the betterment of the parties involved in the corporation). Again, a sociology thing. You probably *could* make an argument for the abolishment of corporations and banks, but it would be like abolishing the class-system or political parties; you only take it off paper, which makes it harder to monitor.
I don´t think expontial growth can continue for much longer. Here is why:
“… we kept producing more and more oil in the decades after the so called "Peak," it became just a matter of extracting more oil at a faster rate than we're finding it….”
Graphs do not include shale oil, but it takes a barrel (for heating, etc.) to produce three barrels. Canadian shale oil gets only 2.9, not 3 barrels for each barrel consumed. (A net of 1.9 barrels gained) So not only is this shale oil more expensive, it produces much more CO2. (and perhaps more expensive food via longer mid west droughts.)*
US badly need to convert to natural gas cars and speed the conversion of trucks to NG.
Graphs and quote form: http://moneymappress.com/pro/Pyrami...5748&s=770803&u=40779324&l=466992&g=92&r=Milo
Which has a lot of gloom about the 3Es (energy, environment economy) Don´t go there is you find the facts about our pattern of exponential growth disturbing.
Algae cells in a pond can double each day. They can´t think, but even if they could, none would understand that when they half cover the pond that their exponential growth means that in two days they will all be dying brown scum. – Humans are a lot like that too in their understanding of what exponential growth implies.
* Even if there is no connection between the worst ever mid west drought and CO2 release, more expensive oil means more expensive food. - The production of food in US requires 400 gallons of oil for feeding each person, and is getting worse as more fertilizer, pesticides etc. are used to increase yield per acre.
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So is your car. Can you fix it? Probably not: too many components from too many sources. The garage where you take it probably has a lot of fancy equipment to test things and the mechanic simply believes the computer when it indicates that some device needs to be replaced. The mechanic knows how to remove the malfunctioning part and put in a new one. But he can't improvise a replacement part; he doesn't really understand how either the component or the testing instrument works.
That's a small example of complexity overload. Your computer is another one. Microsoft doesn't even pretend to be able to debug its own software anymore: too many variables. Interlocking systems of control for such things as an airport or a city's sewage treatment facility are far, far beyond the knowledge of individual human beings.
If the computers break down, we're screwed.
There is no such entity as "humans as a whole" - there is only the aggregate observable result of individual humans performing individual actions. That aggregate is then observed by various individual humans with varying degrees of accuracy for varying quantities of data, and interpreted by individual humans from various perspectives, with various prejudices for various purposes.
This is a scientific term? What's being selected, by what process, for what eventual outcome?
Which societies have faded away because their armies, corporations and banks had insufficient power?
Never mind. I merely suggested what ought to be done.
I don't expect people to start behaving sensibly all of a sudden, and if we don't smarten up really quite suddenly, it will be too late - is probably too late now. So i'm resigned to the collapse of everything as we know it. I imagine there will be survivors, and they will, necessarily, have much simpler lives, but i won't be among them, so who cares?