Let's outsource your job to China.

"As of November 2016 there is a total of 186 nuclear power plant units with an installed electric net capacity of 163,685 MWe in operation in Europe"

https://www.euronuclear.org/info/encyclopedia/n/nuclear-power-plant-europe.htm

It might interest some to learn that many companies, large and small, are leaving China for other countries.

The laws and rules surrounding running a factory here and the massive hikes in wages and workers conditions over the past few years have caused this massive migration.

A close Australian friend of mine is in the process of moving his factory to The Philippines after operating in China for over 10 years. He is fed up with the Government interference, increasing red tape and overall rising difficulties running a factory in China. His factory is small, employing 130 people.

About six months ago, Philips Lighting closed their China factory and moved to Thailand - taking 10,000 jobs with them.

The way things currently are here I can see this trend continuing.

I understand there are plenty of nuclear stations BUT they are not well received by a lot of people. The waste disposal, dangers (Chernobyl, Fukushima) and things like that.

If you announced you were building a nuclear power station in Australia you would NEVER get it built.

I don't know what the regulations are in Europe, but in the US they say even if you decided to build a new nuclear plant tomorrow, it would take 20 years to get built because of the red tape and stricter regulations. The electric grid is incredibly complicated, demand constantly rising and falling, and local power companies having to adjust in real-time to handle it.

This is a documentary about batteries, but it does show how power grids are complicated

I think it has been over 20 years since a new plant went on-line in the US.

I don't think a new license has been issued since the 3-Mile Island scare.

I'm truly sorry that your friend has to go through the massive headache of finding a new workforce with fewer rights and protections, willing to work for cheaper wages in order to maximize his profit.

I'm planning on building a nuclear waste disposal in your backyard.

PM me your address.

Thanks for your compassion and concern for his plight

Put simply he either moves or he will go broke. He is in a very competitive industry and his margins are razor thin. This latest round of cost increases (not only labour but landlords and additional compliance costs) have pushed him to either move or close.

It isn't always about the "greedy businessman using cheap labour for his evil gain" you know.

Outsourcing jobs is always a decision from management to increase their profit margin. These decisions are never made to help the customers but themselves. Instead of being creative and find new ways to improve their products they take the lazy easy decision to find cheaper staff to rob them and than they dare complain about quality. Pathetic.........it's like blaming a whore for giving you aids..... assume your choices.

I have to disagree. They are pretty taboo here. Sure people who know, such as you or I understand they are a very safe and clean way to generate power. However, there's many myths and legend over nuclear power plants (much in the same way Chinese manufacturing is thought of) that simply aren't true or are overblown. I think the US only has about 100 plants nationwide. People are concerned about meltdowns, or the "nuclear waste" ect. New nuke plant proposals are blocked all the time because of nationwide ignorant fears.

Its too bad too because most of the "green" sources of power (wind, solar, ect) aren't cost effective/sustainable yet to be the main sources of power in the country. So we are stuck with fossil fuels for now, even though nuclear is one of the best/cleanest sources we have right now.

Maths is hard.

Because I have some Chinese products in my possession I know what poor quality they are. Often broke straight out of the box. The "assembled in the USA" variety is not much better. I rather pay double the price and get some quality product that performs the task intended and lasts. Unfortunately quality products become increasingly hard to find. I cut back on "Made in China" as much as possible but sometimes it is unavoidable due to a lack of alternatives.

Blame your American buyers for that issue. The factories will build whatever quality the BUYERS specify.

Yes, the business of exploiting cheap labor is very competitive, I understand.

That's one way of looking at it. Yet another and more realistic way of looking at it is that companies will build stuff where manufacturing is cheapest and consumers are stuck without many alternatives.

If you look at the world wide labor market you'll discover that China is well suited to manufacture relatively low cost easy to produce mass quantity products. Complex manufacturing is better suited for more experienced better educated labor markets such as the United States, which is why pinball machines are manufactured here.

Not all of them my blinkered friend.....

Its very sad that you just can't see outside your tiny little square.....sad.

Seems you really need to get out into the world and see some things for yourself.

Your call of course.

I second this from experience. Starting this thread =

Dumpster (resized).png

I get it! Exploiting other humans is a highly competitive business.

i've been to Shenzhen a few times for work (bicycles). its your typical modern industrial city. From what i saw the employees were treated as good if not better than a lot of what we're used to in america. The only knock i have on it is the food they sell in the open air markets would scare the hell out of most westerners and i couldn't find any pinball where i was staying.

"Free accommodations?" Spare us the euphemisms. Call it what it is... slave prisons. And we all know how the "inspectors" aka big boss' bag men are concerned about human rights. ChiComs can go straight to hell as far as I am concerned. In fact, I think they can just stay there and don't really need to go anywhere.

What does one of your "workers" make in USD for a day's work? And how many hours is a day's work? And how many day's work are in a week? pfffftttt.

Now you can tell us how happy your workers are because they were driven off their property in the country so they could move to the slave cities. They're happy alright.. happy they weren't murdered and dumped in a mass grave on the property where they were born.

Good grief....

Various companies in silicon valley (and other tech-centric areas up and down the west coast) offer accommodations for their employees as a perk.

Do they also provide suicide nets and store credit for everything you need in your 6' x 8' shared bunk cell?

My best friend has lived in Guangzhou for 5 or 6 years teaching English, his apartment is paid for, and he makes good wages. Not amazing by Canadian standards, but he lives well in china and can afford to travel the Far East and come home regularly. China is not the same country as it was 20 years ago, sure their are the occasional horror storied, but things are getting better. They're able to produce quality products as well as any other nation.

(Just think how many people died building Hoover dam, those building practices would never fly anymore, and those poor conditions paved the way for the better laws of today.) china isn't as bad as the average American thinks.

I believe most of the debate in this thread is caused by poor education.

I think the same thing about "Made in China" that I thought about "Made in Japan" in the early 70's. Slave trash!

And the raw material import restrictions are an unfair trade practice that will be remedied very shortly.

Yes I buy Chinese garbage. I would rather not, but when the globalists hand manufacturing to the most efficient slaver, I don't really have much choice. A conscious decision to destroy US manufacturing in favor of our trade frenemies was made in the 60s. I'm sorry so many of you have unknowingly or unwillingly participated in your own economic destruction.

When Homepin gets to the point of seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, Jack Ma will start selling bootleg pinball machines out the backdoor of the homepin factory. And Homepin will have NOTHING to say about it. Thanks, suckers!

It would be nice if we could have a discussion free of false dichotomies and other logical fallacies.

We typically only hear about the sensational, isolated incidents in the media, since they make for good clickbait headlines. We rarely hear about the businesses and factories that are run well by people just trying to make an honest living, since that isn't terribly exciting to report on.

ummm, errr.....
slowly backs out of thread

"Don't Mean To Be Rude, But Suicide Rate At Apple's iPad-Maker Foxconn Is Lower Than All 50 U.S. States"

http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-and-dell-investigating-the-foxconn-working-conditions-2010-5

Communists NEVER make an honest living.

Take a look at all the bootleg video arcade games and PCB's on ali-express:

https://www.aliexpress.com/w/wholesale-video-arcade-machine.html?site=glo&g=y&SortType=price_desc&SearchText=video+arcade+machine&groupsort=1&initiative_id=SB_20170612074944&needQuery=n

Some interesting discussions going on here. But all you talking about here is Economics 101 Supply and Demand Equilibrium being sought. And---discovered.

It is an interesting proposition to discuss the merits of Econ 101 Supply/Demand equilibrium in abstract while one is sitting on his ass in class listening to the professor expound on the logic and virtues supply and demand issues. It is quite another proposition when that same one (me) watches as his own job leaves the country for Mexico and is handed a pink slip shortly thereafter.

I have personally felt the sting of outsourcing---my job left me. I also enjoy the benefits of outsourcing every time I go to Harbor Freight, for example (come on, we are pinheads and we JuuuuST LuuuuV Harbor Freight. Admit it )

But nothing new is going on here. Outsourcing has been going on for ages. But here in the good ol' US of A, the outsourcing may have been a company moving a factory and jobs from New York, or Chicago to the midwest where wages and taxes were cheaper---and there were vey few toll roads "out here in the wide open spaces".

Case in point #1: In the late 70s I was running a small retail business in a small to mid-sized Nebraska town. As I recall (perhaps incorrectly, so please consider my numbers to be magic numbers), the prevailing wage was around $4.50 to $5.00 per hour for people who had been at their jobs for years. The city fathers got together and built a small industrial park. An automobile parts manufacturer out of Chicago, Perfect Circle Piston Rings, moved to town and set up shop in the park to make piston rings. And the starting wages were $5.50 and up. It upset the local labor market for a little bit and Perfect Circle was now enjoying cheaper midwest taxes and lower labor costs compared to where it came from.

Nobody in the Nebraska town was bitching about the new jobs except for the established businesses that were now having to scramble to replace lost long-time employees and raise wages for the others still left.

If anybody in Chicago was mourning the loss, I never head about it.

What has changed since then? Those Perfect Circle jobs would have left for China instead of Nebraska. And workers from Chicago would have been able to move from Illinois to Nebraska if they had wanted to. It is a little harder to chase a job across the border.
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Case in point #2: My city's main industry is producing aircraft. The plane maker/employees in Wichita KS are unionized. Several years ago, Cessna Aircraft started a new airplane model and chose a small town in the southeastern part of the state for its location to build a new plant. Good paying jobs in southeastern Kansas are few and far between. Cessna comes in and raises the local wages and is still paying one third to one half of the wages it paid in Wichita.

Wichita and its employees did not like it. But the jobs stayed in state and did not leave the country. And Cessna got cheaper wages.

Later on, Cessna went to China to produce a new airplane model.
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Case in point #3: I used to work for Boeing building the 737s, 747s, and 757s you fly on. Boeing was founded and headquartered in Washington state. Boeing's main production happened and still happens in Washington state with a large manufacturing plant in Wichita. Boeing is/was unionized in Wichita and is still heavily unionized in Washington state.

Several years ago, Boeing restructured and moved its home offices from Seattle, Washington to Chicago. The Wichita plant was sold and is now called Spirit. Spirit is an independent company but its largest customer is Boeing.

When Boeing was preparing to start building its new 787 it started looking around for places to build a new factory. Of course, the union and employees wanted to have the 787 built in Washington but Boeing (as do many other companies ) started shopping for incentives from other states. It becomes dog-eat-dog as prospective cities pony up with tax abatements and other give aways to attract (and poach) jobs from other cities and towns.

The state of South Carolina the pat on the head from Boeing due to some real nice tax giveaways and lots of cheaper non-union labor. As you might surmise, Boeing had to send out lots of its highly trained unionized labor to teach the new South Carolina aircraft workers how to build an airplane. So, now Boeing builds 787s on both sides of the country.

Long term, I would expect Boeing to continue to grow its South Carolina operations and shrink Washington state operations and continue the trend to cheaper labor.

At least the jobs did not leave the county---yet. Wait until China gets its large commercial jetliner online in a few more years. Don't take this lightly. Boeing is the USA's largest exporter. Competing in the world market with China for jet sales will be cutthroat.

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30 or 40 years ago, we used to make idle talk about how much money we could save if we could cut out the middleman. Back then, when we talked about the middleman we were usually unwittingly referring to the wholesalers and distributors. Factory direct was what we wanted. Did you lose your job because the factory bypassed your wholesaling behind and sold directly to me? I'm so sorry but that's the breaks. Tough shit for you; Maybe next time you will try to get yourself educated to get a better job.

Now, here we are 40 years later and the internet is the fly swatter that makes it possible for us all to buy "factory direct". First, it was Walmart that cut out the wholesaler. And then Walmart cut out the manufacturer by buying up China. And next, along came Amazon, that is eating everybody's lunch, including Walmart's.

Between the Amazon/Walmart bookends, everybody's nice paying job with a pension is at risk.
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All of the above is to try and illustrate that business is always looking for cheaper labor costs as well as other cheaper inputs. The big difference now is that transportation makes it easy for production to happen worldwide but makes it difficult to follow jobs across borders.

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I laugh when I hear people taking about cheap Chinese products and try to extend that cheap quality to the lack of skills of Chinese people. If what you bought was of cheap quality, that is because it was designed to be cheap and built cheaply for the cheap buyers that frequent Walmart and Harbor Freight.

As attested to earlier on these pages, Apple's iPhone is not of poor, cheap quality. China will build, and can build, the quality that is required.

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As far as jobs go, to quote whoever. "we have seen the enemy and he is us" ! It all depends on who is lucky enough to avoid the job chop axe the longest.

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A few months ago I needed some new gas shocks for my hatchback lid. Publicly traded auto parts stores like Autozone, Advance Auto Parts, and O'reilly's ( all who just love cheap Chinese car parts ) have run all the mom and pop auto parts stores from town. Tit for tat, I use Google and found an online auto parts store for my gas shocks. These shocks were cheaper than the big three auto parts retailers prices, so I bought online.

I had a choice in prices. One brand sold for $48.00 a pair. The other brand was $3.00 cheaper. "What was the difference?", I asked. The more expensive pair was made in the USA. Hmmm. OK. For three bucks it was worth buying USA. Both of these choices were cheaper than Autozone etc.

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Here is something about the political system in the US that perplexes me. We have this 50 year old boycott with Cuba that morphed somewhere along the timeline that we cannot do business with "communist Cuba", while at the same time while we shop the next "bargain" at Walmart---or Harbor Freight---we send all of out money to Communist China.

For the longest time, I have wanted to print a T-shirt that says, "Down with Communism Shoot Castro", on the front while the back would printed to say, "Support Communism Shop Walmart". I wonder how long I could wear a shirt like that before Walmart would kick me out of the store?
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I started rambling quite a while back so I will shut up now. But I leave with a question:

I once read somewhere that years ago, Gottlieb outsourced its wire harness work to some Indian reservations in North Dakota or some other nearby state. Nowadays, most of the auto makers wiring work goes to Mexico. Why couldn't the car makers send their wiring work to the reservations instead of out side the country?

Government intervention in free markets?

Anyone can try to make an honest living, no matter where they happen to live. They might not be gung ho about their situation and where they happen to live, but living in a particular place dosesn't mean they are all crooks or agree with the people who are in charge.

You have to look past the sterotypes and sensational headlines to realize there are actually normal, every day people just trying to get by and raise a family.

Interesting read, and really helps to shine a light on the fact that there is nothing new about companies moving production to lower their costs.

All of this is pretty much mute though, as even the chinese factory workers will soon be losing their jobs (along with everyone else) to automation / robots. People don't see it yet but that tsunami is heading to shore and when it hits ALL these low-paying, marginally skilled jobs are toast. Then what should we do? Burn the machines? I think that it's time to rethink how people can make a meaingful living in the era of ubiquitous automation.

Well, in Japan, it might have been "Slave" but it was certainly not trash. Japan was making some good products by the early 70s.

And I don't think anybody could consider Honda motorcycles from the 60s junk. It was Milwaukee USA made Harley-Davidsons that were junky oil leakers.

When we reach utopia we will go the way of the Krell.

I was not suggesting govt. intervention in free markets, but you do raise an interesting point. At the same time, it is govt. policy that allows, or dis-allows, markets to enter or leave the country.

Agreed. When Japan first starting manufacturing products for export (1950's) they had terrible quality, similar to early Chinese exports. Once they adopted Total Quality Management principles the quality of their products steadily improved and by the late 1980's most anything in Japan was of substantially higher quality than what was available elsewhere.

Personally, I view Japanese manufactured products to be as the highest quality available, though the list of things they actually make is ever shrinking.

I still drive a 12 year old car that was built in Japan by "robots that knew what they were doing".

Monster From the Id!

"...the key thing that Hayek grasped that many modern advocates of laissez faire don't is that government regulation of markets is not the same thing and not even close to being the same thing as full-on central economic planning.

In fact, I'd go even further and argue that the existence of a free market where individuals can freely pursue their economic desires and enjoy the fruits of their labor is a product of freedoms secured through government regulation. A free market isn't something that just magically appears out of nothing. It is a complex system born out of the context of a whole framework of legal, social, and political conventions that allow for the development of individuals who are capable of making the discerning economic and social decisions required for the functioning of a free market.

Beyond the basic freedoms of the night-watchman state — secure property rights, freedom from coercive violence, freedom of movement, freedom of association — a genuinely free market requires regulation to secure other freedoms as well, like the freedom from being tricked by misleading advertising or from being poisoned by dangerous chemicals. I would also suggest that the following are equally important to the creation of a free and healthy marketplace: freedom from starvation; freedom from dying from easily curable diseases; freedom from environmental degradation caused by pollution; and the freedom to develop yourself as a person through education. After all, it is no coincidence that the market economy only really began to develop when the modern democratic state did too."

http://theweek.com/articles/446954/free-markets-need-more-regulation-than-think

My sister; she is prostitute.