On 11/18/2010 05:30 PM, Hawke wrote:
On 11/18/2010 5:00 PM, Ignoramus5827 wrote:
I visited SK Hand Tool factory in Chicago. It is a surprisingly big
complex of large, old, slightly mysterious, industrial buildings. I
was there to pick up a card cabinet.
What I saw there was forklifts that moved metal crates full of tools
(sockets, socket extensions, wrenches, cabinets etc) and dumped them
in a big metal dumpster. Turns out that the new owner (Ideal
Industries) that bought assets of bankrupt SK tools, does not want
those goods and decided to scrap them. They are declining all
offers to buy that stuff.
The manager of SK tool personally accompanies the dumpster to Gary,
Indiana, to make sure that the tools are all dumped into the scrap
furnace and not pilfered on the way.
Pretty much everyone over there is shocked at this. I was, too. It
reminded of of the Soviet Union, where that sort of waste abounded and
"not giving a ****" was the new religion. The only difference was that
in the Soviet Union, all that stuff would certainly be stolen there,
and here I am sure that everyone honestly played their part and
everything that was supposed to be destroyed, would be destroyed.
i
The anti government people need to learn a lesson from this. This is a
"business" decision. We all hear from the right wing constantly how
great private enterprise is and how inefficient and wasteful the
government is. Well, that is a crock, of course.
Actually, "of course", it's half a crock -- since _any_ big organization
is inefficient and wasteful, it's a pretty short leap to come to the
conclusion that government, business and your friends the unions are
_all_ inefficient and wasteful.
If you really looked at
business practices around the country and the world you would see that
business is rarely, if ever, better than government at doing things.
Business does a terrible job all the time. You just don't see it because
when business does poorly they go out of business, but before they do
they do whatever they do very badly.
Don't forget that neither businesses nor unions need to disclose what
the hell they're doing.
You would think that if a business has a good product they couldn't
screw it up and go bankrupt but it happens all the time. My sister used
to work for the Simmons mattress company. They made the Beauty Rest
mattress that was as good as anything on the market. But they did a
lousy job and they went down. So when you see this kind of idiotic thing
done by a business just remember that it isn't an anomaly. It happens
all the time. But you don't have an anti business group publicizing it
like you do when it's the government doing things badly, which they can
do too.
You're not mentioning the times when it's unions that drive their
associated businesses, or their whole industries, into the ground.
Business people are often capable of driving companies under all by
themselves, but they often have help, even so. In fact, you should read
some of the articles that Iggy linked to in previous posts -- it sounds
like the union at SK should be getting a "job well done!" sticker from
China right about now.
--
Tim Wescott
Wescott Design Services
http://www.wescottdesign.com
Do you need to implement control loops in software?
"Applied Control Theory for Embedded Systems" was written for you.
See details at
http://www.wescottdesign.com/actfes/actfes.html