Good point Mike.   Was that the Japanese Model or was it the Deming Model
that America rejected and so he took it to Japan?    Their stronger culture
accepted the robotics but still took care of their citizens put out of work
by it.

Today, the same thing has happened with the IM System's programs of John
Warfield that are being used in China at the moment but in America they are
a college department at George Mason University.    That's what America does
with innovation.   Give it a department in an academic institution and
forget it.   They explored that model in the early 20th century with
culture.  Wall Street sold the factories for rare medals used in computers
to China.   Then businessmen say, "government didn't stop me, if it was
wrong you should have stopped me!" but they spend billions lobbying to keep
from being stopped. 

The system doesn't work.   It's immoral, it's brutal, it's not a society
it's a brothel in the middle of a piracy.   Store those good creative things
in the education institution and the churches.   America now trains for
education, churches and the immoral market.    Keith, Ed and Harry are
asking the wrong questions and so their answers don't work.  

But we are just an internet list.   

The guys from MIT, Harvard, Yale, Oxford, Cambridge, Stanford, etc. have all
but forgotten the meaning of citizenship.   Citizens means we are all
connected.   When a nation has poverty and you are benefitting it means you
are white trash.  No one remembers that.   My family is Reynolds and they
were RJR Tobacco.   Distant family but when tobacco was popular, my
grandmother visited the company on a tour.   She made an offhand comment
about being family.   The demeaned her as someone wanting a share of their
money.   She glowered at them and turned and walked away.   But she told us
the story and said that she wasn't asking, just stating facts.   When
tobacco went down we simply thought that a stupid world view had come full
circle and now they were paying the price for it. 

Of course when the system crashes they will blame the least powerful group
in the privileged.  Like Hitler created full employment.   He got rid of a
very talented small group that were powerless to fight him.   And he created
full employment with the rest. But the real problem was Europe's treaty that
created a deep seated hatred in the German people for everyone else and the
German people's inner psychology that made them need a scapegoat to keep
them from facing their own demons and taming them.    What is rarely said is
that Hitler would have been the Andrew Jackson of Germany if he hadn't have
gone to war.   He would have killed all those Jews and Europe would have
looked at them as they are treating the Gypsies today.   Just as Andrew
Jackson murdered the prosperous Indian people and got away with it.  Hitler
would have gotten away with genocide and it might well have spread given the
prejudice of Europe, if he hadn't declared war.  I see plenty of
Anti-Semitism today and I've walked down the street with opera singers from
Europe who spit on synagogues as the pass them.  

The truth is that we are all connected and everyone must be taken care of,
from the smallest to the greatest of life.   But we can't even do that with
citizens, the life in soil that makes life possible doesn't have a chance.
We don't even take care of our own citizens in this system.  

REH

-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Mike Spencer
Sent: Thursday, October 28, 2010 3:24 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: [Futurework] Re: Both schools are wrong


Keith wrote:

> Find me a new consumer product that's highly desirable by the rich,
> very expensive -- say, equivalent to what the car was in the
> 1910s/20s -- but capable of repeated phases of mass production until
> it reaches down to everybody in due course.

I'm not sure you thought here is the right one, Keith.

In Made in America [1], the authors point out (1989) that US
manufacturers have done as you describe, introducing a New Thing that
only the rich (or industrial users) can afford.  All-cast-iron, gold
plated with hand-fitted parts, so to speak. Once the carriage trade
market is saturated, they introduce the Elite model, then the Pop
model, then the Consumer model followed eventually by the Commodity
model for the lowest consumer base.

But way back at the intro of VCRs, the Japanese used a different biz
model.  Engineer for production.  Make a consumer model and flood the
world with it. Because they have a million units in use (rather than a
few thousand) they get statistical quality control, feedback on where
the design or engineering failed.  They fix that for the next run.  At
the end of a year or a few years, the US producer is just getting
tooled up for production engineering for the mass-production version.
But the Japanese already have the expertise, the technology, the
machinery and the data on what does and does not work in a consumer
product.  They own the market and can recover any losses sustained
back when their first mass release had, perhaps, a large number of
returns, call-backs, plant design failures or whatever.

So maybe we won't ever see any new FatCat models of anything anymore.
Thirty years on, Apples seems to have adopted the Japanese model,
releasing the iPhone, not for the rich but for the merely reasonably
well-off, in vast quantities.

- Mike


[1] Made in America: the MIT Commission on Industrial Productivity,
    Michael Dertouzos, Richard Lester, Robert Solow, et al., MIT
    Press, 1989
-- 
Michael Spencer                  Nova Scotia, Canada       .~. 
                                                           /V\ 
[email protected]                                     /( )\
http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/                        ^^-^^
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