Is there a problem with US products?

Just cut this out of another thread where i was burdening everyone's eyes

What i'm suggesting is that many US products aren't competing well on a quality level, because of some problems in the manufacturing industry as a whole.

There are a few suggestions that peculiarities of US management approaches have lead to a decline in product standards and/or international desire for them.

For example:

Short-term actions which bring about short-term share growth to please investors (around 50% of the US population own shares don't they?). The accusation is that not enough attention is being put into the long-term search for a superior product (i.e. in areas like airplane and mobile production for example).

Another possibility is that there's an emphasis on bare-bones production techniques that then rely on style over content to sell the product (sounds like a stereotype i know - but it's interesting to note that in the Chrysler/Daimler merger, for example, some CEOs referred to it in those terms - that the US brought the style and marketing, while the Germans brought the decent engineering and R&D).

A final blow to US products in the last decade has come in food - where companies have swiftly embraced new technologies (where there is indeed lots of R&D), only to find many countries view the technology as flawed. (Hormone treatment being a noteable example, with GM currently following the same route for various reasons)

If these three criticisms have any validity, the products themselves are likely to remain uncompetitive.

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Virtual Reality chatter on a movie site? Got endless amounts of it here. Reviews over here

If there's a problem with US products, people will stop buying them. If and when that happens, US businesses will step up to meet the qualitative standards of the rest of the world, as always.

The profit motive is strong. Strong enough to cause businesses to cut corners at times. But also strong enough to cause them to hold themselves to a higher standard if they need to in order to make money.

Uh, no. If you don't buy our products we won't allow yours into our country. And anyway, we already have the best products aside from Japan. Do you want to but a Polish plasma tv? How about a Russian MP3 player or a Canadian PDA? Buy American baby! We need money for bombs wooo!

Well, ok. Yoda is right when talking about cars. Toyota used to kick our butt then we raised the quality of our cars and made them cheaper, but I don't think that applies to much else. Tv's, appliances, and electronics come to mind.

If you are complaining about shoddy American products don't tell us. Tell Taiwan or Mexico. They make them. We love third world labor.

Yes… I can’t find any…

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Which cars are these now? I must not be able to see them around this f*****g SUV in front of me. I think American cars have gotten larger, less efficient and are of a lower quality now more than ever.

Not a fan of giant SUVs

_S

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Race to the Bottom

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Well, we'll see if it happens in areas like people-carrier planes, phones and cars. I don't think there's been a meaningful export market for any of those for a long while.

I just got some back-up on my assertion that US biotech businesses are one group that looks long-term with their products (well, in investment for profit, not in safety). They're buying up all the Euro-biotech's according to New Scientist. And they're able to do that coz their stocks are valued much higher, coz there's a perception of future profits in Genetic Engineering in the US which isn't reflected in Europe.

I hope they dine on their own mutated swine.

But some "good" news for this industry is that Germany is only 1 month away from opening the GM-food floodgate to Europe (their big biotech is still German owned ). They're going to allow GM crops. (although with far stricter seperation distances, and with a reversal of the legal position - i.e. - it's the GM farmer's fault if their crops interbreed with others, not the recipient's as it is in US/Canada)

The "bad" news for GM people is that, concerning the released "brands": Animals don't like eating them, they're far less able to deal with climate extremes like drought and flooding (so you better hope global warming plays nice with the weather extremes), and they've already caused herbicide-tolerant "superweeds" across Canada.

Nice. Bring on the GM-insects that a US think-tank is now worrying about eh? They're worried that release is running ahead of regulation in all "state-side" applications. Guess that's why the biotech's think they can make a quick buck b4 anyone can notice.

SUV's! I forgot about them. I don't know why people love them.

How do you know animals won't eat GM crops? Cows eat other cows and don't complain, why would they mind GM foods? Besides, what are we going to eat on Mars? We need GM corn that grows on Martian soil. How about corn that grows underwater, like in the sea. That would feed us and the fish! Instead of electric eels how about electric plankton that we can mine for energy to power our cities? Woohoo! Go GM go!

Doh sunny.

Cows that used to eat cow blood didn't have any choice. The anecdotal evidence shows that wild and domestic animals eat non-GM food over GM when they have a choice. Other farmers have found that their herds have gone off their food when only provided with GM-feed, but ate normally again when returned to non-GM feed.

The over-all point on GM tho is the lack of safety testing done on the technology itself. It relies on manipulation of various gene-forms which control mutation and reorganisation of the genome. We have absolutely no idea about the long-term effects of altering the expression of these genes, or even how/why exactly they alter the genome in the way they do. Add the use of retroviruses etc that increase the possibility of gene-transfer between different species, and we're looking at the tip of the iceberg of problems lurking beneath this technology. (I won't even begin to go into the details or the other issues )

Almost all the GM "brands" so far have proved themselves to be inferior to normal varieties in numerous ways, and are only becoming predominant in some areas coz of aggressive marketing and "gamesmanship" (i.e. buying-up and destroying competitive seed-stock - not telling people it's GM for a start when it comes to animal-feed etc etc).

If you like the idea of electric-fish being accidently created, then go ahead and support this technology's application (if introduced faculties can pass from crops to weeds, the literature suggests they can pass between other species too). The point is, we're in no position to control the alterations we're irreversibly applying to the world's ecosystems.

Even if the damn things start doing what they're supposed to, they're still a bad product.