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:Manufacturing in China and Taiwan is certainly cheaper, but protection of intellectual property is a concern. At least right now someone cannot copy a product without having to buy a sample, measure, construct the jig and do a test fit. But I know of a few big manufacturers/tuners in Japan who had contracted out there to get products made, to find their products being offered to others with a small change in color. hem... The same principle goes for jobs and products that are outsourced to China and India. I hear people claim that the economy is simply morphing into another form, and that we'll always find some new way to make money. I'm not so sure about that. What can we really do that someone in a poor country can't do cheaper? People make it sound like everything is fine and dandy, that our economy is moving from a manufacturing economy to an intellectual property oriented economy. That is overly optimistic... blindly optimistic in fact. When you look realistically at the concept, you realize that you can't steal a factory or a semiconductor fab from a business, but you can easily steal their ideas. Where do we go from there? When you move to an IP based economy and people in those third world countries (the same ones you moved your factories and office buildings to) begin to steal your ideas for free, suddenly you realize that they have your factory, your office, your ideas and therefore your business.
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13:31:27 10/19/04
