iPhone maker Foxconn hatching US factory expansion plan? Foxconn, the employee-infuriating, child-employing, and brain-damaging manufacturer of kit for Apple, Amazon, Sony, Nintendo, and others, is exploring the possibility of building plants in the US – Detroit and Los Angeles, to be specific. At least that's what unnamed "market watchers" have told DigiTimes, the Taiwanese online …
"Those aforementioned market watchers, however, say not to expect your next iPhone or iPad to be made in America – Apple products are too complex to be built by mere 'Mercans.
"Since the manufacturing of Apple's products is rather complicated," DigiTimes reports, "the market watchers expect the rumored plants to focus on LCD TV production, which can be highly automated and easier.""
In other words, the assembly of the iPhone and iPad can't be automated and they have to pay real people to do it. And it's a lot cheaper to pay people a pittance of a wage in China than in America, which has labour law.
There is a talking book I have insisted my partners listen to, we can actually read, called That Used to Be Us. How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back by Thomas L. Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum .
The book, written two or three years ago, predicted this reverse transference of knowledge would happen, following America's decline in so many areas..
You can download it from PirateBay - get the talking book version, it's so much easier to follow - believe me it's a must read, just change America with the UK and it is just as appropriate.
I haven't read your book, but I take the point- in the recent Reg article about water-permeable bricks, the linked source was merely using the sand technology company as an example of the backing the state council was giving the business park.
China isn't stupid, and has been looking beyond just being a manufacturer for some time.
knowledge always transfers from well-educated to less-than-well-educated. The US now falls into the latter category (thanks in part to "evolution is wrong so I'll teach my dang kids the proper way to bash a bible without no skoolz"). There's nothing "reverse" about it - it's the way it's always been, it's just that the US is now in the special-ed category and China, for all it's wacky communistical ways, is now teaching it's people stuff that helps its growth. Ironically it's the Communists that are letting ideology take a back seat to education now.
I can just imagine LCD screens being assembled, carefully, quietly and efficiently by chinese workers, before being "disassembled" into three parts with "PUT TAB A INTO SLOT B" written in massive red letters across them, before being shipped across to the US so that 'merkins can slowly and carefully "assemble" them again. (alternatively, fully built screens are shipped to a "quality control" factory in the US, where a conveyor belt whisks the screens through a room full of americans at high speed. If an american gets within 2 metres (6 feet) of the conveyor, cheeseburgers and coke are automatically dispensed into the far side of the room.)
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