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I read a very interesting article over the weekend about why the USA has such a hard time competing in the new global economy. The story began with President Obama asking Steve Jobs (this conversation was in February, 2011) what it would take to get Apple to bring their production back to America? Jobs replied, "Sir, those jobs aren't coming back." Then it goes on to describe in layman's terms why. (It describes one electronics assembly factory, Foxconn City in Shenzhen, China, where 230,000 employees work 12 hour shifts, 6 days a week, many living on-site in company dormitories. If they get a new client they can hire 3,000 new employees overnight and begin work immediately.) It was a real eye opener. It's a long, but worthwhile read. You can read it here if you're interested.
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Over the weekend Mr. & Ms. "W" moved in to the new home we just finished building for them. Their big crisis was that the movers stole Ms. W's purse. Besides the obvious money and credit cards inside, her purse also contained ALL the keys to their new home. They had a locksmith come out and re-key all the locks, paying him the emergency / weekend price of $800. I'm thinking it should have cost a fraction of that, but the guy pulled up out front and saw their $1.3M house and had an instant price increase. (I think they got robbed twice this weekend!) Then to rub salt into the wound, when the cops got there, they found the original keys! The crooks tossed 'em.
Looks like I'm playing Suzy Homemaker today. I need to make an appearance at work, but I should still be home by early afternoon. To give K a break I'm going to wash clothes and clean out the refrig. I can't imagine doing that full-time, like my mom and most mom's of the 1950's did. I'm afraid my brain would atrophy.
Gotta go. Fabric softener awaits. ;)
S
My husband does most of our laundry (I'd say that I do it about a third of the time). He treats it like an engineering problem so he has a "method" that I'm not to interfere with :)
ReplyDeleteI heard about that same article. Dr. M (the civil war historian) compared it to the cotton monopoly that the US south had with all that "cheap" labor.
What's fabric softener?
ReplyDeleteThe trade and job issues we have with countries like China are too complicated for the simplistic solutions proposed by people like Romney, Trump or Gingrich. The last thing we need are trade wars, and Huntsman was the only Republican who seemed to understand this.
Stephen....I don't know if our politicians understand it or not, but they definitely couldn't compress it into a 30-second sound bite the voters could comprehend. And that's about the attention span of the average voter....30 seconds, tops.
ReplyDeleteBug....Interesting comparison. Scary, too. The loss of the South's cheap (slave) labor devastated its economy, large areas of which remained destitute for a century or more. Are we destined to experience a re-play of that economic black hole?