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April 1, 1990
THE WORLD; The Negotiations With Japan Get Personal
People wonder whether Japan is an unstoppable mercantile power aspiring to global dominance and refusing to play by free-market rules...
20 years later...
August 16, 2010
China's Rise to Top Looks Unstoppable
Let’s leave aside worries of a property bubble and a new crop of bad loans. Forget the specter of protectionism.
Okay. I'm leaving all those worries aside. Let's see what happens.
“The powerful tendency since the 1980s towards increased inequality in income distribution is likely to be reversed,” Mr. Garnaut wrote.
I wonder how high he expects the wages of the following workers to rise?
China
Mr. Garnaut of Australian National University predicts that even richer vistas could open up for the likes of India as China’s comparative advantage shifts to technologically complex goods from simple manufacturing. Think high-speed trains, not plastic toys.
Power supplies sound technologically complex. Should I be thinking about those?
Taiwan
SilverStone Zeus1200W (ZM1200M & ZU1200M) power supplies are made on a fully automated assembly line in Taiwan to achieve quality and precision levels not possible with normal power supply plants that utilize assembly workers.
Realtor.com Reports Active Inventory Up 25.9% YoY
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*What this means:* On a weekly basis, Realtor.com reports the
year-over-year change in active inventory and new listings. On a monthly
basis, they report t...
3 hours ago
3 comments:
Well, I have seen fully automated production lines lose out to cheap labor. (Automated clock assembly in Taiwan that went bankrupt due to Chinese non-automated competition.)
Full automation is nice, but if labor is cheap enough and the consumer is more price-sensitive than quality sensitive, then it won't work.
That said labor is going up in China, and automation is getting easier (I assume that it is.) I wonder if Silverstone is competing at the low end or high end of the power supply market?
Coba
Coba,
Excellent points. The power supply is definitely high end.
Silverstone Zeus 1200W (ZM-1200) Power Supply Review
I'm reminded of an anecdotal story of a factory in China shutting down its powered conveyer belts and having workers move items by hand to save on power costs a few years ago.
I would also point out that self service checkouts were added and then recently removed at my local Wal-Mart, no doubt to the dismay of 5-finger discounters. D'oh!
That said, my local grocery stores still use them and I would expect them to become increasingly popular as the technology advances.
I'm reminded of an anecdotal story of a factory in China shutting down its powered conveyer belts and having workers move items by hand to save on power costs a few years ago....
Wait, wait, Harley Davidson had to scrap a fully-automated inventory system and go back to a Japanese hand cart system for quality reasons, too.
Coba
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