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Japan to fund firms to shift production out of China

bloomberg.com

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Re: Japan to fund firms to shift production out of China

#221

Post by FooBarWidget »

system16 wrote: post #43
FooBarWidget wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 2) China trying to use soft power, but the whole drama feels fake. It is good that they are sending supplies (often faulty and not up to the quality, see dutch story around this) but it doesn't feel genuine. Allow me to disagree with this one. I see people questioning China's motives on helping other countries, but in my opinion this is a baseless and overly cynical view of things, not truth. People want to buy int…

> they ordered the wrong thing. China did not intentionally send bad masks, nor was it a manufacturing quality problem. That doesn't align with what's being reported (by other countries as well): > "Thousands of testing kits and medical masks are below standard or defective, according to authorities in Spain, Turkey and the Netherlands." > "Dutch officials said that the masks did not fit and that their filters did no…

My sources: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22825391

Re: Japan to fund firms to shift production out of China

#222

Post by chillacy »

tomp wrote: post #37
jennyyang wrote: post #4

At the very least, medical supplies and drugs manufacturing will get pulled back into each country. The 3M spat between Canada and the US makes it abundantly clear that in a time of true crisis, you can't even trust your closest friends when something terrifying happens to the world like this pandemic. Whether it means all manufacturing will move away from China or if it means that they will spread it globally, is an…

To be honest, I don't understand what efficiency gains this kind of globalization was supposed to bring anyways... A factory in China is just as efficient as a factory in Spain or USA. Obviously, cheaper workers work for less, but that's not exactly efficiency , (1) more a question of fairness, (2) can be done domestically (low-cost immigrant workers) and (3) there's plenty of cheap workers worldwide, not just in Chi…

> A factory in China is just as efficient as a factory in Spain or USA.

I'm not sure how you're defining efficiency, but in the Netflix special American Factory, it would seem like the chinese workers were not only cheaper but also more productive.

Re: Japan to fund firms to shift production out of China

#223

Post by mrtweetyhack »

systemvoltage wrote: post #9

Actually this pandemic has shown some true colors of many nations. 1) US trying to unsuccessfully hoard supplies, issues with the German testing company 2) China trying to use soft power, but the whole drama feels fake. It is good that they are sending supplies (often faulty and not up to the quality, see dutch story around this) but it doesn't feel genuine. 3) European countries are in-fighting for supplies. Switzer…

China is SELLING supplies, not sending.

Re: Japan to fund firms to shift production out of China

#224

Post by [deleted] »

christkv wrote: post #209
bigpumpkin wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is false, by the time they shut down movement out of Wuhan, the airport was closed. There were, however, people who already left Wuhan who then left the country. There were also repatriation flights out of Wuhan.

I think people forget that they gave 48h warning before the lockdown happened causing a huge amount of what was likely infected people to flee.

[deleted]

Re: Japan to fund firms to shift production out of China

#225

Post by nybble41 »

tomp wrote: post #37
jennyyang wrote: post #4

At the very least, medical supplies and drugs manufacturing will get pulled back into each country. The 3M spat between Canada and the US makes it abundantly clear that in a time of true crisis, you can't even trust your closest friends when something terrifying happens to the world like this pandemic. Whether it means all manufacturing will move away from China or if it means that they will spread it globally, is an…

To be honest, I don't understand what efficiency gains this kind of globalization was supposed to bring anyways... A factory in China is just as efficient as a factory in Spain or USA. Obviously, cheaper workers work for less, but that's not exactly efficiency , (1) more a question of fairness, (2) can be done domestically (low-cost immigrant workers) and (3) there's plenty of cheap workers worldwide, not just in Chi…

> cheaper workers work for less, but that's not exactly efficiency

It is efficiency, really, because it's making better use of an underutilized resource. Over time, of course, the price of labor evens out because the resource is no longer underutilized.

> more a question of fairness

If it's fairness you want, telling companies to hire locally isn't going to cut it. That's the opposite of fairness, really—you would be subsidizing local workers whose wages are already higher at the expense of foreign labor that has more need for the income.

> Another potential advantage could be, factories are closer to natural resources, but it seems to me that that's not as much a question of efficiency, as it is of lax (enforcement of) environmental standards.

Locating factories near their required materials is a net gain even when ideal environmental standards are maintained. It's almost always cheaper (economically and environmentally) to ship end products where they need to go than it would be to ship raw materials around to distributed factories. Concentrating manufacturing in one area also makes it easier to confine the environmental impact.

Re: Japan to fund firms to shift production out of China

#226

Post by the-dude »

FooBarWidget wrote: post #220
the-dude wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sources please ( I am Dutch and I am surprised about your claims ).

Let op! Niet elk mondmasker geeft voldoende bescherming tegen corona! -- Explains the different Chinese standards -- https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/let-op-niet-elk-mondmasker-ge... Trouw -- "Als gevolg van de tekorten zijn de criteria voor het gebruik van de mondmaskers verlaagd" (because of the shortages, they lowered the standards for masks, making it easier to purchase the wrong thing) -- https://www.trouw.nl/poli…

So you have no source for the claim that 'The Dutch made an ordering mistake'.

I won't read LinkedIn btw, that is not a source.

Re: Japan to fund firms to shift production out of China

#227

Post by virmundi »

_wldu wrote: post #83

The USA really needs to stop rewarding the quarterly profit driven stock market approach to management. It's the same thing that caused Boeing to build bad airplanes and the same thing that causes companies to build insecure software. We need to get back to engineers and architects (who actually know what they are doing) making decisions and building solid solutions and products. Companies can be reasonably profitabl…

I don’t think this was ever a real thing. DC-10 had terrible problems. When you bought a car in the 50-60s you’d have a notepad in the car and write down the issues you found. You’d then have warranty work. I agree with your goals but let’s not get into a Make America Great Again mindset.

Re: Japan to fund firms to shift production out of China

#228

Post by FooBarWidget »

remarkEon wrote: post #214
FooBarWidget wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well doesn't the fact that they mention "SARS" confirm that they didn't know it was a new virus? COVID-19 is not SARS. It's less lethal but far more contagious. SARS would not have been such a big issue because it doesn't spread as easily.

COVID-19 is SARS2. Not sure what your point is unless it's to be pedantic that Novel Coronavirus is not what is colloquially known as "SARS". https://www.niaid.nih.gov/diseases-conditions/covid-19

The initial scientific name is similar, but it is still a different virus with very different characteristics. As I said: it is less lethal than SARS but MUCH more contagious, plus a much longer incubation time and possibility of asymptomatic spread. Sars cannot be spread asymptomatically. About the only things similar are that they are both coronaviruses, and the symptoms. I am not being pedantic at all, these characteristics are key.

Sars 2 is to Sars 1 as Mario 2 is to Mario 1. About the only thing similar is the characters.

How many times have we seen another variant of bird flu in the past 15 years? I lost count. Some of them even jumped to humans. But when that happened, we didn't immediately raise alarms of an upcoming pandemic: a virus jumping to humans does not always mean human to human transmission is possible.

Re: Japan to fund firms to shift production out of China

#229

Post by blub »

henearkr wrote: post #206
surge wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is, the WHO does, they even said this thing wasn't transmitted person to person. And they're supposed to be the authority everyone was saying to listen to.

I think that the WHO communication was proportionate to the current knowledge at the time of each of their interventions. First of all they said, when it was clear there was a problem "We have a simple message for all countries: test, test, test." (and then Trump and almost everybody else did not want to hear that) And moreover they said more exactly, some time before the previous item, that "Preliminary investigatio…

No. The WHO constantly downplayed this pandemic and kowtowed to China to the point of disgracefully delaying calling it a pandemic and then playing catch-up when individual countries started ignoring the WHO and implemented their own measures.

Then the WHO switched gears and complained that the countries were doing too little too late.

They've been almost completely worthless in this crisis.

Re: Japan to fund firms to shift production out of China

#230

Post by stainforth »

tomp wrote: post #37
jennyyang wrote: post #4

At the very least, medical supplies and drugs manufacturing will get pulled back into each country. The 3M spat between Canada and the US makes it abundantly clear that in a time of true crisis, you can't even trust your closest friends when something terrifying happens to the world like this pandemic. Whether it means all manufacturing will move away from China or if it means that they will spread it globally, is an…

To be honest, I don't understand what efficiency gains this kind of globalization was supposed to bring anyways... A factory in China is just as efficient as a factory in Spain or USA. Obviously, cheaper workers work for less, but that's not exactly efficiency , (1) more a question of fairness, (2) can be done domestically (low-cost immigrant workers) and (3) there's plenty of cheap workers worldwide, not just in Chi…

I think the problem is in allowing capital to continuously seek out higher profits by finding places and people that they can exploit.
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