Posted on 12/16/2016 6:58:35 PM PST by central_va
I read somewhere that I could get a carburetor the gives 80 MPG.
Not everyone could afford a TV repairman. When our TV would fail, I would take out all the vacuum tubes. walk over to the Safeway grocery store and test all the tubes. Most chain stores had vacuum tube testers. I would buy replacement tubes and get the TV going again. Then TVs started appearing with transistor components instead of tubes. Old style TV sets with vacuum tubes were showing up at Salvation Army and Goodwill stores for a couple dollars apiece (or less). The newer transistor TVs couldn't be repaired as easily, and most people would toss them out if they failed.
That is most likely due to EPA and OSHA regulations. All the lead back-up batteries for cable boxes, etc. are made in either Vietnam or China.
The bottom line is you are an anti American bigot. Simple as that.
The funny thing I heard about the old vacume tube stuff is that they are immune to EMPs.
Dunno if that is true or not. But I do know this, any old car/pickup with generators, etc, will run. That includes old farm tractors and so on.
But then again, the power grid will be zapped so..
There are many US manufacturers of “authorized” military boots.
If the problem was a burned-out vacuum tube, it was easy to DIY the repair. I made many similar trips to the nearby drug store, which had a tube tester. If there was a problem that required more sophisticated diagnosis, my parents called the TV repairman. He was at our house so often, he was like a friend of the family.
When you’ve got nothing sensible to say, you resort to name-calling. Classy.
“I recall when I bought it, there was a “made in U.S.A.” print on the box.”
Made in the USA with Asian parts?
Pictures of US Steel South Works site in Chicago (abandoned lake-front land); and of former Wisconsin Steel site in Chicago.
US Steel South Works:
http://www.chicagobusiness.com/apps/pbcsi.dll/storyimage/CG/20160801/CRED03/160809995/AR/0/U-S-Steel-courts-developers-for-South-Works-site.jpg
https://cdn3.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/6128689/south%20works%20google.png
Wisconsin Steel:
https://portal-ccc.s3.amazonaws.com/media/images/uic/29/ns0kx9g.jpg
There are no primary lead smelters in the US. There are secondary smelters which use recycled lead that is used to produce, among other things, ammo.
Not true. I worked for an electronics component manufacturer’s American distribution warehouse for 20 years. We shipped $100M/yr worth of capacitors to American manufacturers. Half of that we manufactured at our plant in NC and the rest came from Japan, China, Singapore and Indonesia.
I toured a Delco facility in Kokomo where they made most of the stereos for their vehicles as well as airbag sensors and triggers. We shipped about a third of our product to other distributors like TTI and Digikey and Marshall who must have been supplying to American manufacturers. Some of our shipments went to plants in Mexico including Sony and Toshiba TV, but not much. Granted our business had fallen from a high of almost $200M in the late 90’s, but as of 2014 when I last worked there they still shipped a lot of product to American manufacturers.
So the American electronics industry is not gone, just greatly reduced, and can be grown back. If we push the “buy American” theme, we won’t even need tariffs. Of course, this is impossible if agreements like WTO and TPP outlaw labeling the country of origin. People can’t choose American made products if there is no labeling requirement.
The problem with your thinking is that as a rule of thumb, the selling price of a consumer item is about 10 times the manufacturing cost.
And then you have to realize that if a worker earns $30/hour, the real cost of his labor is about 3 times that when you look at the real cost of employing him. Which includes overhead, taxes, fringe benefits, government reports, etc.
So, that $30 hour of labor comes to about $900 more in the price of the TV.
“What’s scary is that if we went into another world war, we are toast because we make NOTHING here anymore”
I read a report several years ago that said we’d be really screwed because we don’t make ZIPPERS any more.
Yep. And I really think it is more regulations than wages that is driving that. There just aren’t that many man-hours of labor in building consumer electronics.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4tvKeNjoRSE
I remember as a kid going to Thrifty drug stores with my dad and testing all the tubes from the TV using a GE machine there to find out which one was bad and buying the replacement. It used to be almost as easy to repair your own TV as changing a light bulb.
I just love articles that say “as of the date of this article” but has no dateline so you know when it was actually written.
That’s it, right there. Electronics manufacturing requires so few man-hours of labor that it seems impossible that the difference in labor cost could outweigh the cost and risk of shipping the item across the world. Freighters lose cargo containers overboard in rough seas. Damage occurs in shipping. Long shipping times make judging market demand harder than JIT manufacturing. Environmental and labor regulations probably add more cost than the higher wage does.
I agree. It goes completely against “free trade” but I’ve been thinking there should be absolute limits on imports of manufactured goods. Say only 20% of the market for any product with national security impact can be imported. Auction off “import licenses” for each product to see who gets the privilege of selling to 20% of our market. Rather than calling it a “Tariff”, call it an “import license” that just happens to equal Trump’s 35% of the value of the product.
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