The De-industrialization of America

[MicroPilot]

... year end financials are now the horizon

True, and this is the only thing that matters to most businesses. No pride in making something to last, indifference to the work force.

 

[300UGUY]

Actually, there are a number of reasons that we can't be competitive with China. One, their labor is ridiculously cheap. And if you think they're still sitting in the dirt carving stuff out with a nail, you've got a lot to learn. They have mastered mass production (we taught them how) and have the latest and greatest equipment, largely due to government subsidies. I know a guy who worked as an engineer in China for 3 months, and he was blown away by the state-of-the-art equipment they have. A second big factor is that they aren't playing by the same set of rules we are. OSHA? EPA? Not a chance. The government there is pro-business, unlike some other countries. Of course, safety takes a huge beating. Thirdly, their materials are cheaper, either because the government subsidizes them, or because their laws make them cheaper to produce. We found that we could buy finished plastic products cheaper per pound than we could buy the raw materials here in the US. That includes the shipping!

Our company survives in a small niche market. We run short runs that the Chinese aren't interested in. We run medical and military products that the customers don't trust to foreign companies. And we run products for the handful of entrepreneurs who cling to the 'Made In America' mantra. We've cut all of our costs to the bone; if the economy was better, I'm sure a lot of our production workers would jump ship for greener pastures. Pay and benefits are lousy.

Our only hope is that as quality of life declines here, and improves in China, the trade deficit will even out. Meanwhile, the knowledge of how to manufacture is fading away. People like me are aging and retiring, and the younger generations are growing up without this knowledge. By the time things even out, China will have such an upper hand, we will just be one of a number of failed empires. Hopefully, the transition will be peaceful.

I'll finish with a story from American history. At the beginning of WWII, the Japanese ruled the Pacific Ocean with a fleet of new ships. We had an aged fleet of ships, mostly from WWI. In a remarkably short time, we caught and surpassed the Japanese fleet, WHILE fighting in Europe! How? All of the factories were turned over to war production. Detroit made military vehicles instead of cars. Even small shops joined in the effort. Years ago, it was common to see War Board brass labels on machines from that era. If another country, say China, for instance, decided to take over the world, who would stop them? You can't mount a huge effort like the one in WWII if the factories and the knowledge to run them doesn't exist.

I talked to some people that sold tooling to GM, and asked why so much is made in China, and I was told that they could buy finished tool holders and inserts cheaper from China than the raw matieral cost here. Same thing with low tech stuff - I just bought a drywall hoist from HF - $169. I can't buy the steel for that here.

 

[300UGUY]

Our company survives in a small niche market. We run short runs that the Chinese aren't interested in. We run medical and military products that the customers don't trust to foreign companies. And we run products for the handful of entrepreneurs who cling to the 'Made In America' mantra. We've cut all of our costs to the bone; if the economy was better, I'm sure a lot of our production workers would jump ship for greener pastures. Pay and benefits are lousy.


That is the only way a lot of Michigan companies can survive. One of my neighbor's is a manager at a auto supplier. 10 years ago, he was paying up to $15 per hour for production workers. Now he is paying a little over $8. He says anything more than that, and the work goes to Mexico or China. Manufacturing is a dead end for young people. I know a lot of engineers that will not let their kids go into engineering / manufacturing. Years of getting pay & benefit cuts have left the older generation embittered. Why pass the pain on?

 

[Larry Caldwell]

1. The Post Office.
I have used online bill pay for years. I can see services getting drastically reduced. For the most part I think they need to adjust their model, increase the bulkrates and leave the first class/letter rates alone.

They may go to MWF deliveries. Fine with me. Nobody depends on the USPS for timely delivery any more.

4. The Book.
I have been reading e-books for years, since it became possible to do it on PDA's and so forth.

The biggest killer to e-books right now is the price, they are actually charging more for the electronic version than the paper version in some cases. Going to take a while for the industry to come around but e-book versions are becoming more and more prevalent. Having widely accepted readers and, more importantly, common formats, have been the biggest hurdles.

Try Project Gutenberg for free classics: Project Gutenberg - free ebooks online download for iPad, Kindle, Nook, Android, iPhone, iPod Touch, Sony Reader

Amazon.com has a huge inventory of e-books priced under $1.00. Most of them are niche market books that would not have the sales to justify a print run. If you are interested in them, you can find many more specialty books than ever in the past.

The Gutenberg Project is great, but can be a little opaque. There is an easily searchable front end at ManyBooks.net - Ad-free eBooks for your iPad, smartphone, or eBook reader that makes finding books a lot easier. I run Kindle software on my Blackberry, and am never without a book to read as long as I have my cell phone. I find that the MobiPocket .prc format works better on my phone than the Kindle format.

5. The Land Line Telephone.
I have not had a personal land line in about 6 years, we all just have cell phones on the same plan so we don't consume minutes. This is massively more expensive than a single landline but way, way better.

I do have a landline for my home office but it is only used as a trunk line to our PBX for my office number to ring at my house. My $10/month no long-distance line ends up costing about $32/month after all the taxes, fees, etc etc are added in :confused2:

Maybe someday there will be cell service at my house. The cell phone revolution so far is primarily an interstate highway and urban phenomenon. Move 3 miles off the interstate, and in half the USA you will lose cell service.

6. Music.
I have known music labels were in trouble ever since I got hold of software from Fraunhofer in the early/mid 90's that could encode mp3's.

As for music itself, I think it has been in trouble since the advent of massive music labels These companies totally control what music makes it to your ears by controlling whats gets made into albums, what gets played on the radio, etc. With the internet at least small bands have a chance but getting your music to the mass market is a huge challenge and hence we still have music labels.

If you remember the crap that passed for popular music in the 1950s, that was entirely the big record labels. RCA, Columbia, etc. controlled who was allowed to record and what songs they were allowed to record. Small record labels in the '60s broke that monopoly. The big labels got it back by buying all the radio stations. The internet has broken that monopoly again. Online providers like Jango will let a band pay a small promotional fee ($10) for 250 listings with similar bands. Listeners can do one click sharing with their social networks. There are very successful bands out there that nobody outside their demographic has ever heard of.

7. Television.
DVR and Netflix baby!

Let's hear it for creative content providers. With a DVR, I never watch commercials any more. If the advertisers put their commercials in a program guide, I would probably watch some of them, but most commercials mean nothing to me, so just skip them all.

8. The "Things" That You Own.
There have been lots of tech ideas that never made it, I think cloud computing is one of them. With ever smaller, faster devices there is less and less impetuous to move the computing somewhere else. My Ipod Touch plays Youtube videos better than my desktop machine!

People seem to be getting maxed out on "stuff." Past your basic needs, stuff starts to own you. Who wants a beach house when you have to spend every vacation doing maintenance on it? You can rent a beach house for a week, and enjoy yourself instead. Stuff just piles up and gives you more to clean and dust. The recession seems to have made conspicuous consumption gauche.

As for the computing cloud, it's great for sending movies to your friends. You can upload 3 or 4 feature films to the cloud and they can download them at their leisure. Email providers generally don't let you attach more than 5mb to an email, but Silverlight lets you upload 25gb. It will have its place.

9. Privacy.
Absolutely people have less 'privacy' than they did before. For some things technology has simply made information more available. Like your property taxes, speeding tickets, any time spent in court etc. This was all public information before but harder to get than a few clicks on a keyboard. Overall I think people will become more cautious about what info they do give out.

I find the whole privacy issue to be pretty strange. I grew up in the '50s, and everybody in town knew your business. In cities, everybody in the neighborhood knew who you were, and what you did in private. Our mobile society broke that, and information technology is putting it back together. People got away with a lot of crap because they were anonymous. I don't have much sympathy for people who freak out because people might find out who they are. They should lead a decent life and quit being thieves and libertines.

Nineteen Facts About The Deindustrialization Of America That Will Blow Your Mind

I have mentioned on here before that in the 90's there were some books written by William Rees-Mogg and James Dale Davidson called 'The Great Reckoning' and 'The Sovereign Individual'.

'Reckoning' talked about cycles through history and how, soon, the U.S. would cycle out of the Industrial Age and into the Information Age. At the time they thought Japan would be taking over the Industrial part and become the next Super Power but turns out it was China.They talked about how military force is what traditionally has driven who is a Super Power and how that may change. Projection of that power has been key through history, how the stirrup gave 'Nobles' power because mounted knights were hard to knock out of the saddle. How gunpowder changed this equation because knights became sitting targets, etc etc. An interesting read just for that part alone.

'Sovereign' talks about the moves 'people who can' will make to move other states, countries, etc. to lower their tax burden, get better services for their money etc. As wealth moves out of the U.S. taxes will increase more and more for people who actually can pay them. This will drive people to move elsewhere, in particular 'information' workers who can work from anywhere.

I still have these books in storage, I should break them out and give them another read :thumbsup:

I think people don't realize how long this has been going on. In some cases we just got out-competed. While Motorola was selling service on their TV sets, the Japanese were selling TV sets that didn't need service. I still remember buying a 10 year old Datsun in 1983 and putting 185,000 miles on it with nothing but minor repairs. My previous American vehicle was worn out at 90,000 miles.

Things were cheap because the dollar was king. Of course, the high dollar was restricting exports, and 1500 American farms A WEEK were going bankrupt, but you could buy foreign electronics, cameras and cars cheaper than the ones made here. Jobs started disappearing. Politicians started talking about switching the USA to a service economy. I heard what they were saying, and was tired of my wages stagnating, so I abandoned a life of productive labor and switched to a job where I produced nothing, for better pay and benefits and a stable paycheck with no layoffs.

If you look at history, the cycles are a lot longer than they are since the information age. I will give the Chinese 20 years to be top dogs, if their system doesn't fall apart first. World food demand is getting insane. I would give it 50/50 that we might have a worldwide famine in the next 20 years. Farmers should make a good buck.

 

[smstonypoint]

Maybe someday there will be cell service at my house. The cell phone revolution so far is primarily an interstate highway and urban phenomenon. Move 3 miles off the interstate, and in half the USA you will lose cell service.

Larry,

No offense, but that's an extraordinary claim. The Verizon and AT&T coverage maps say otherwise. Admittedly, I don't travel extensively, but I only occasionally run into to dead spots.

Steve

 

[Ken45101]

Larry,

No offense, but that's an extraordinary claim. The Verizon and AT&T coverage maps say otherwise. Admittedly, I don't travel extensively, but I only occasionally run into to dead spots.

Steve

They lie! Verizon shows excellent coverage not only at our house on the ridgetop, but even down in the valley. We tried Verizon and took it back two days later, coverage was intermittent at the house. Nobody covers the roads down in the valleys here and it's intermittent on the hilltops.

When we were camping down in northern Tenn., we had to drive 15 miles to get a AT&T cell signal.

Ken

 

[ultrarunner]

They lie! Verizon shows excellent coverage not only at our house on the ridgetop, but even down in the valley. We tried Verizon and took it back two days later, coverage was intermittent at the house. Nobody covers the roads down in the valleys here and it's intermittent on the hilltops.

When we were camping down in northern Tenn., we had to drive 15 miles to get a AT&T cell signal.

Ken

Only minutes from the State Capital in Washington and no cell coverage... the maps show coverage that doesn't exist...

 

[niemeyjt]

We are losing Post Offices here in UK too - as much as anything down to EU competition rules in this case - and as the OP says our wonderful customer serving banks (!) want to stop cheques in 2018.

However, much is down to the people who just accept these things. People who buy the latest Chinese-made plasma 42" TV because, well you know, its well wikid and life just would not be worth living without it like and cos that 38" they got last year ain't kool no more and cos its cheaper innit(*). People whose benefit payments aren't dependent on their buying habits.

Junk food and X-factor - the 21st century equivalent of the Roman panem et circenses - bread and circuses - the political classes keeping the masses on-side with materialistic offerings. It is cheaper to do this with cheap Chinese cp@p.

Picking up on two other items in what OP said - privacy and cloud computing. I, and only I, can unlock my Truecrypt container with my personal files in it whilst it resides on my local hard disk.

Secondly, with content hosted in a cloud, will we see ISPs and Cloud providers removing content, or access to content, to appease the political elite?

J

(*) for an explanation of this use of English, Google Vicky Pollard, Little Britain

 

[Shazbat]

I've found Verizon's maps to be quite accurate in the northeast, even down to a few feet.

Phones make a HUGE difference, I avoid anything that the phone hobbyists at howardtalk rate as having terrible signal quality.

With my last BlackBerry, it even managed to pull a signal where there was no coverage on the map.