Never let the truth get in the way of cutting expensive jobs/factories and hiking prices
See title.
Almost a year to the day after a huge earthquake and devastating tsunami rattled the north-east corner of Japan, crippling the supply chain of key technologies, the production at some components plants is reportedly still not back to 100 per cent while some tech firms are accelerating their plans to leave the archipelago. The …
Far warmer than eastern Canada despite what you may believe, low cost Hydro Power, plenty of fresh water, lots of potential employees that have a good work ethics, sound educations and low wage expectations (for the US), State and Local Industrial Development Agencies that will pay for everything just to get the jobs here, no Tornados, no Major Earthquakes, Low cost of living, great food, plenty of entertainment, centrally located, all forms of transportation available, new airports, decent highways, with drive times that are less than 1/3 of most commutes in large cities.
Oh, and plenty of stable bedrock....
All that and 6 major universities within 100 miles of Buffalo. Only downside, the occaisional snow storm which has been less than 30" total for this year.
....but it is how the market operates. I think the losses of many lives and the struggle to recover is already bad for the Japanese people but to see factories moving out and people losing their jobs as well is horrible. Unfortunately I cannot blame those companies for leaving. Japanese workers are very expensive. To have to shut down operations because of so many natural disasters plus the nuclear meltdown problems......I think is enough for anyone. It is a risk management issue and Japan did not survive to tell the tale.
> but it is how the market operates
An interesting comment! Maybe a system that is inexorably bringing the vast majority of us down to poverty wages isn't quite a system we should be agreeing to, even if only for the sake of self-interest? (unless you are somebody extracting the surplus of course - I wouldn't want to suggest that you go against your own self-interest!)
for building our major manufacturing centres on the Pacific Ring of Fire. Concentrating all our civilisation's most essential technology fabrication plants in the planet's most geologically unstable region was bound to have consequences sooner or later.
Australia and Russia both have much more suitable areas for this. Both the Pilbara and Mongolian Siberia, repsectively, are geologically stable locations with no volcanoes and only rarely minor earth tremors, an almost complete absence of rain (so no flooding), distant from oceanic shorelines (so no tsunamis or hurricanes), free of vegetation (so no fires) and level ground for easy construction and transportation. In addition, these areas are useless for cultivation and so utilising them does not subtract from available food producing land. Finally, both areas, being devoid of rain and cloud, would make perfect sites for massive solar power stations to drive the fabrication plants and the necessary air-conditioning for the area's workers.
So relocating our tech-fab facilities to either location would do much to remove the disaster-induced issues we face today.
"We"? I pretty sure big japanese semiconductor producers want to keep "their" fabs right where they are i.e. in Japan. This isnt just about where would best for building a fab afterall. Renesas will bounce back just fine because other Japanese companies will by chips built here over anything else
To a large degree our modern manufacturing capabilities depend on the availability of cheap ways of shipping goods around the place. That goes for the supply chain (components, but also fuel required to run everything--including the transport infrastructure) and finished/semi-finished products. The fact that there's already a major transport network for firms to "plug into" in western Asia means that it's economically feasible for the sort of geographical division of labour on the myriad parts that go into, eg, a modern computer or smartphone.
The problem with the two places you mention is that it's going to cost more to get everything there or back, and your lead times are probably going to be longer. With everyone looking to get the best bottom line, are these places really going to be able to compete?
...wasn't Lewis Page throwing out article after article, constantly telling us that it wasn't that bad at all, that it was mostly fear-mongering, and that things may be back to normal soon enough?
And then, they upgraded the disaster to condition 7, on par with Chernobyl, and Lewis was strangely silent on the issue afterwards... And the place still has a dead zone of like 20 miles or more. The surrounding oceans are slowly getting more irradiated. And it could be decades before they get the place cleaned up.
Good times.
To this day, those articles filled with denial still piss me off.
I live in Tokyo.. and the Fukushima issue is very much felt here.
There's certainly some excessive paranoia as well, but there have been real issues:
- Excessive cesium detected in kids that drank tap water in the Fukushima area
- Abnormal level of radioactivity detected in the trafficked Tokyo central station
- Freshly built radioactive houses built with some raw material (stupidly) coming form Fukushima.
- Kids in the Fukushima area having mass nose bleedings
- Unanswered causes of death for some workers (many of which were initially coming from lower social circles and hired through the yakuza).
And I don't even follow the news anymore.. because there is so much of that, that at one point one just wants to unplug from it.
Yes, people aren't being burned alive or anything spectacular of that sort (sorry).. but the effect that that single nuclear plant gone wrong has had on millions of people is very real. For some is physical, economical and psychological, for others is _hopefully_ just psychological.
There is a lot of hyperventilating about Fukushima, which is probably not a bad thing because it will have its place in the balance of common sense which will, probably later rather than sooner, be restored. In the interests of creative muddification, though, workers at a chip plant in eastern Canada or upstate New York will be exposed to twice the background radiation that prevails in Tokyo because they will be so much closer than Tokyo workers to that good, firm bedrock.