I find that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have. - Thomas Jefferson

When It All Falls Down

by Manwhore

I have been reading quite a bit these days about Obama and his plans for green. People, I work in the manufacturing industry. LEAVE GOING GREEN TO YOUR PURCHASING DECISIONS!! I want to cherry pick one example of our recent advancements, just to show you how your purchasing power has dictated an entire industry. It’s not a hard one to look at, and it explains quite a bit.

the example I wanted to discuss is the CD player. Remember those? You could buy them four years ago. they are complex devices full of working parts. Everyone of them you as the consumer pay for at a marked up rate. I was recently asked to design one, and it was a humorous experience. The thing about these items is that they are very complex and labor intensive. A lot of complex assembly, a number of working parts, and the relevance of such an item came to immediate light.

It would seem that technology eliminated the need for such an item. Our dollar eliminated the prospect of it. I communicate with China daily, and we manufacture exclusively with that country (as does almost everyone). A little lesson in Ex-Factory costs: This is the cost given to us that we then use to generate FOBHK costs. This generates two costs for the retailer we use to ship the item, LCL (Loose Container Load) and FCL (Full Container Load). I dutifully chased these prospective costs down, and I found out that this product is an unprofitable item for me to make. There were a lot of reasons for this, but the salient ones came down to two. One, I design products in an era that labor and plastic are the most expensive they have ever been. The other, has to do with marketable relevance.

In the last four years, there have been major changes in the way we purchase items. If you walk the “majors” you would find that there aren’t really many CD player boom boxes to be found. There really aren’t many MP3 players to be found (I’ll explain why this is so later), but the logic behind it is that this is not profitable or marketable anymore. We live in an age where technology has usurped the relevance of many products. This would be the reason a bank would laugh a calculator manufacter out of the bank, it’s in your phone, or mp3 player, etc. So too goes the CD player.

This phenomenon has done more to reduce a carbon footprint than the Kyoto Treaty ever will. This has done more to reduce China’s influence over us than a blockade on trade ever might. Americans now question the need for three separate items when one I Phone might suffice. Speaking solely for my industry, we are a victim to recession. Not because we are just getting picked on, but because we are at a loss to meet market demands. We are losing a fifth of our market. We are losing them because our customers have shifted thier concerns, and we lose our market at a younger age than ever. We lose them to digital solutions to what we used to provide up until, Ohhhh, three years ago.

Back to Obama, he has a horribly ignorant solution to this problem. Our “recession” is people like us scrambling to understand this new landscape. Going green means manufacturing less, and we are already doing that. We couldn’t give a shit about regulations, we always work around them. Testing? Safety? Formalities, and our dutifull Chinaman help us making that part work. Who we listen to is the voice of the consumer. You want “Made in America?” We will give you that. You want green? We can make that happen, too. The point is that we listen to you, and respond to your needs. No. government. needed.

As for “Going Green”, if you believe that shit, you are deluded. “Made in America” simply means assembled here, and only to a certain extent. Green will boil down to some regulation. We have already begun this work. We have some corn based plastics, and in a spat of delicious irony, that is now more expensive than oil based plastics. We in the manufacturing sector welcome this. Much like the new trend of “grass fed” beef, this means we no longer need to waste money on making premium products, we only need to make the cheapest stuff cost the most. Parting ways with China in favor of our jobs is another stupid decision. Sure, demand it. There’s ways to work around, and we will do that.

The point is, there is no government solution for green. The solution to going green, is green. Get it?

Comments

Posted by Ed Kline on 07/05/08 at 08:40 PM from

Attention Lee :

I dont know if you got this before..I wont do this a third time lest I am bothering you.

This guy taught a free course on the understanding the constitution at my local public library last night. He is also the guy who teaches some self defense classes I have taken my kids too, so I’ve met him a couple of times. He used to work for Ron Paul.

A synopses of who he is :

Stewart Rhodes Rocky Mountain Montana, US E. Stewart Rhodes is an ex-U.S. Army paratrooper, disabled veteran, former firearms instructor, and former member of the D.C. staff of Congressman Ron Paul. Stewart graduated from Yale Law School in 2004, where his paper “Solviing the Puzzle of Enemy Combatant Status” (available online at http://www.jpfo.org/sr-enemy.pdf) won the William E. Miller prize for best paper on the Bill of Rights. Stewart is currently a Yale Law Research Scholar, writing a book on how the applications of the laws of war to the American people in the “war on terror” pose a grave threat to our constitutional republic. Stewart is from Las Vegas, where he attended high school and college, graduating from UNLV. Stewart currently practices law in Montana. He welcomes comments by e-mail at stewart.Rhodes@aya.yale.edu

and

I thought maybe you’d dig it. A very in depth look at detention of enemy combatants from a Yale legal scholar with a very old school libertarian bent.

Posted by Ed Kline on 07/05/08 at 08:44 PM from

hmmm web addresses didnt go through....odd they were there in the preview.

ok…

and

Posted by Ed Kline on 07/05/08 at 08:46 PM from

wow something not working here…

ok sorry to do it this way

award winning paper :

http://www.moreliberty.org/more_liberty/2006/11/solving_the_puz.html

and blog wth relevant stuff on the right :

http://stewart-rhodes.blogspot.com/

I dont know why the <a> isnt working...I did it fine the other night, ands its fine in the preview…

Posted by Loud on 07/05/08 at 09:43 PM from

Chinaman is not the preferred nomenclature, dude.

Posted by on 07/05/08 at 09:49 PM from

I have a CD player in my closet - I haven’t touched it in 3 years.  We have a Bose stereo that gets used several times a year, and I play a CD every now and then in my SUV.

Last week I got a Razor 2 and loaded a couple hundred pirated songs into it.

Last week as we went through my mother’s apartment after she passed away we found a pretty substantial collection of 8-track tapes for her stereo....

Posted by Manwhore on 07/05/08 at 09:58 PM from

Chinaman is not the preferred nomenclature, dude.

hardly. It means “man of China”. Do you dispute that?

Posted by Lee on 07/05/08 at 10:11 PM from

hardly. It means “man of China”. Do you dispute that?

I’ve blogged this subject extensively over at LeeInChina.  See here, then here, and finally here.

Suffice it to say that, delicate western sensibilities notwithstanding, “Chinaman” is exactly how a Chinese person, male or female, would refer to themselves:  中国人.  The first two characters mean “China” and the last one, which is designed to look like a pair of legs walking, basically means “human or “person.”

In the afore-linked posts I also discuss why I think referring to Asians is far more racist, and weigh the merits of the phrase “oriental.”

Posted by Lee on 07/05/08 at 10:12 PM from

Attention Lee :

I dont know if you got this before..I wont do this a third time lest I am bothering you.

No, I got it.  I can’t get to the sites for some reason, so I’ll have to read them the next time I’m using my proxy server, which is slow as dogshit.

Posted by on 07/05/08 at 10:40 PM from

A

“Chinaman”

is also a completely legitimate delivery in cricket.

Posted by on 07/05/08 at 11:24 PM from

Chinaman… has a certain ring to it.  I shall add it to my vocabulary at once!

Posted by on 07/05/08 at 11:49 PM from

is also a completely legitimate delivery in cricket.

Although more commonly called a googly.

Posted by on 07/05/08 at 11:50 PM from

Whoops - confused myself there. They’re exactly the opposite, actually.

Posted by on 07/06/08 at 12:24 AM from

The Chinaman is not the issue here dude.

Posted by on 07/06/08 at 03:21 AM from

The Chinaman is not the issue here dude.

Thank you. It was just a reference to The Big Lebowski ;)

Posted by HARLEY on 07/06/08 at 08:22 AM from

shut up, donnie…

Posted by on 07/06/08 at 09:48 AM from

Are we REALLY in a recession, or do people repeat it enough that we believe it? 

A recession is defined as two quarters of negative economic growth. We haven’t even had one quarter of negative growth.

from here...

You know, I’m suprised that John Stossel’s articles don’t get more coverage over here.  Yes, sometimes he falls in the same trap that Penn & Teller’s Bullshit fall in, but they are generally quite good..

Oh, and On Topic, CD players suck.  The only CD players I use are the ones in cars.

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