Woodcraft clamp deal

[Brian Henderson]

Which makes them yuppie idiots.

[Brian Henderson]

But people don't usually buy expensive tools as a status symbol, they buy them because they work. Anyone who buys expensive tools just to look at them is just as much an idiot as the SUV-owners.

[Bill in Detroit]

I really don't care what the energy costs are because they are built into the overall cost of the product just as various local living standards are. But I DO care whether my local marketplace is healthy and that suggests that I purchase from it myself if I am able to do so and not prohibited by:

• high cost

• simple unavailability

• low quality

• impeding regulations or other statutory restrictions.

Why? Because I know my customers and I know that they tend to live within 10 miles of me (with a couple of exceptions in California and one in England). So money I pump into the local economy, to the extent that it remains here, ultimately benefits me too. I sell a pen to the guy who sells gas to the guy I buy bread from.

When I start seeing a significant number of my sales going to Taiwan or mainland China, I will make extra effort to buy from them. As it is, I now have to go out of my way to buy locally made goods.

Bill

[Joe Gorman]

If you buy the tools it makes more sense to use them as a status symbol, or maybe we should call them something else. Think of what you could buy from Lie-Nielsen and Lee Valley for the cost of an suv! Joe

[J. Clarke]

That is a much more sensible argument than "it wastes a lot of energy to ship something from Asia" but do they really make cars and appliances and televisions and tools locally where you live?

Personally, national origin means a lot less to me than performance and cost. I notice that it's always "Asia" that gets the complaints, I never see anybody griping about those Swiss jigsaws. In the short run protectionism helps the local economy, in the long run it hurts everybody--want the Chinese to quit being a cheap labor market? Fine, encourage them and pretty soon their labor rates will be right up there with the US, Japan, and Germany. Took Japan about 40 years to get from bombed out ruin to the second largest national economy in the world. One wonders how long it will take China to get to that level.

The thing is, once Asia is all up to a high standard then it will be Africa and once they're up there there isn't really much of anywhere else left with a large population that will take starvation wages--this century is probably going to be the one in which poverty in Africa is finally solved not by the UN but by those hated multinational corporations. In the meantime they're difficult to compete with.

[B A R R Y]

I always thought of cars as interesting status symbols, especially with all the creative financing and leasing available nowadays. It's not _that_ difficult to get an "impressive" car for almost anyone with a job.

One of my local small airports is next to a good sized trailer park. I know, go figure! There are brand new examples of many very expensive cars parked in front of the trailers.

The most expensive car where I've personally known the owner was a rare Audi (Only 501 produced, to meet some World Rally "production car" rule) owned by a 30 year old who worked for me. He lived with his parents...

[Bill in Detroit]

International economics is a very difficult beast to predict with any certainty.

I rather suspect that the multinationals will, with the assistance of complicit governments, 'solve' poverty by spreading less wealth more evenly and pocketing the rest.

Bill

[J. Clarke]

Oh, they won't _want_ to pay good wages, but they'll end up paying them anyway.

[bf]

I have a relative in the steel business. Apparently his company buys some kind of parts that require some kind of coating on them. On the ship to America, the parts get coated and then the waste from the coating process is just dumped in the ocean. In the USA, the coating would be considered hazardous waste and expensive to dispose of properly. The damn Chineese don't care and just dump the shit in the ocean to get rid of the "problem" of how to dispose of it.

I'm not sure how new this practice is, but it happens.

[bf]

That's a nice theory, and it might work out that way.. I think it will partially work that way for offshored jobs which require a highly skilled and/or educated person and if the supply/demand factor drives up the salaries in China. We've seen this happen to some extent with the IT workers in India. They aren't making 4-5k/year anymore. They still make less than US workers, but the gap is closing.

I'm not sure it will ever happen though for the textile workers and other low skill jobs. The coorporations are not going to let them unionize. The government isn't going to protect them. I think China is going to be a good source of almost slave labor for coorporations for a long time (unfortunately).

They've already started farming stuff out to parts of Africa, by the way.

[J. Clarke]

One could have said that about Japan once. The trouble with "almost slave labor" for some occupations and high pay for others is that eventually all your workers move to the others, then you have to offer high pay to get them to come back to the mill.

China has a very large population and relatively little industry, so it's going to take a while to get there, but outside efforts to stifle their economy will just prolong the process.

Good. The sooner they're brought up to a reasonable standard of living the sooner they'll stop killing each other for hardscrabble farmland.