Altawaowr wrote:

Yes but people in poorer countries can now afford things like radios
and bicycles because they're made in china. $20 vs. $100 US is a big
difference in affordability when you make two dollars US a day. I
saw some fairly decent $30 bicycles in a carrefour market in Shanghai.
Because they're $30 and not $100 a lot more people in Asia, Africa,
Latin America can afford one. That people in countries like the US
are buying it too is to our advantage. If we didn't they could still
sell it there and we'd pay many more times for the same utility.

Most Chinese bicycles are one gear, just two sprocket wheels and a
chain. I never did get the point of having 21 different gear settings on
a bike that will be used only in a city (unless your city is San
Francisco ). I guess American bike makers do that to extract more
money from customers. Also, I should note that before the era of
transistors most of the world's people couldn't afford a radio, much
less a TV or a satellite dish. America was an anomaly with a radio in
every room-average people in Nazi Germany or Japan could barely afford
one tabletop set built worse than the average American table radio.
Using transistors eliminated the need for the craftsman skills that went
into building tube models, so the radios could be produced in Asia
(first Japan, then China) for much less than in America. This trend has
hit all industry in America-for example, once a way to standardize beef
production was invented, the skilled butchers at the slaughterhouses
were fired and the jobs given to unskilled Mexicans working for much
less. The end result is that skilled, highly paid manual laborers have
been thrown out of work, reducing the size of the middle class.


On Sat, 28 Feb 2004 09:20:29 -0500, "Pierre L"
wrote:


"B Banton" wrote in message
.. .

Pretty soon we'll have radios from China. Same idiot conservatives
that are buying them are screaming about NAFTA. Oh my my...!!


It's our rich industrialists in collaboration with our governments (US,
Canada, and others) that have been pushing free, globalized free trade over
the objections of the public for years now, and they were all falling over
each other trying to get an advantage over every other western country in
trade with China. I always thought it was a bad idea, but since that's what
"they" want, I'll be darned if I won't take advantage of it now to get more
for less, now that China is producing good stuff at ridiculously-low prices.
It's a vicious cycle.

Pierre