Top of the Tops: Li, Lee, Romney, Kate Middleton

THE TOP ASIAN LEADERS GOT THEIR START IN GOOD ENOUGH MARKETS -

Meetings of the Kings of repair and refurbish and semi-knockdown and shipping in Asia could tell us much about the "mystery" of Chinese imports of used electronics.   If they talk about old times... if walls could talk! Shipping line magnates offered cheap sea containers to electronics shangzai mock-upiers in Korea, who had  new plastic cases minted by Taiwanese molding companies, who had the wares re-assembled by contract labor commanders.  The history of development of the Asian Tigers, told through the eyes of "e-waste".

Kate Middleton found it missing

Here an article by By Jung-Ah Lee and Jeffrey Ng, via the Korea blog of Evan Ramsted of the WSJ.  It shows a rare meeting between two rich, wealthy, billionaire LEEs.. Li Ka-shing of Hong Kong's Cheung Kong Holdings, and Lee Kun-hee of South Korea's Samsung electronics.  Both are from the generation where Asian entrepreneurs learned to cloak used and repaired electronics (radio, stereo, tape player, computer) in new plastic garb, putting used CRTs into new "television" boxes, etc.  As young men, each lived in a country as poor as Africa is today.

Li Ka-shing is now one of the world's 20 richest men. He can get containers into Hong Kong.  Lee Kun-hee started out buying used Sony and Phillips gear, and found he could sell it for more if he got brand-new plastic cases, perhaps from (Taiwan) Simon Lin's Wistron, who began in the business of molding plastic for computer monitors and TVs.  Terry Gou, also of Taiwan, was able to assemble assembly lines to put it all together in Shenzhen's Foxconn, and Rowell Yang's Proview turned them into monitors for Dell, Panasonic, IBM, etc. at Proview...

Missing woman found on beach, after safe search, not to be Princess Kate Middleton

These tycoons wrote an end to Monopoly and patent troll boundaries when Japan, USA and Europe were extending trademarks and patents at the urging of established tech manufacturers.  They took a lesson from Japan, "A Network of Tinkerers", and built companies from "good enough" into global brands [Economist].

Wistron's Simon Lin, Proview's Rowell Yang, and Han Hoi Foxconn's Terry Gou represented the Taiwanese ownership Beijing Chinese generals wanted to fail.  But the money brought into southern China by those men, and the billions made by Li Ka-shing, and the rise of South Korea, proved irresistible.  Communist China couldn't beat 'em, and today has joined them.  But these guys are all of the age to remember the wars, the battles between Mao and Cheang Kai-Shek, the Korean War, all living in lands at the edge of starvation, dominated by Japanese and USA industrial giants, trying to just copy their way out to make a living.

AWESOME Exploitation: Crowdsourcing the Developing World

Having documented ad nauseum that 85% of the computers sold to Africa are reused and repaired, and documenting that the 3B3K market (3 billion people earning $3k per year) has added internet access at 10 times the rate of growth of the "developed world", how do we create employment without outsourcing a job?

We outsource work done by an overheated machine.... IBM's Big Blue, perhaps.  It's "immaculate exploitation", no jobs exported, no toxics, creating jobs out of code.

This AWESOME article from MIT Press (found on /.), Human Workers Managed by an Algorithm, explains how human interaction is more efficient for certain mega-computing processes.

Supercomputing is actually more efficient if some of the algorithms are done "by hand".  The programs have to check off boxes which are obvious... humans can do it instinctively, and crowd-sourcing limits or eliminates subjective bias.   The problem is you just cannot afford to do it in Silicon Valley, your maximum return is $4 per hour.

By assigning such tasks to people in emerging economies, MobileWorks hopes to get good work for low prices. It uses software to closely control the process, increasing accuracy by having multiple workers perform every task. According to company cofounder Anand Kulkarni, the aim is to get the crowd of workers to "behave much more like an automatic resource than like individual and unreliable human beings." 

Four bucks per hour is great for MOST people in the world.  Awesome, in fact.   And they are not taking jobs away from  Big Blue, they just give the megacomputers more "leisure time" (if you are stuck in the thinking of Marx, Hegel and John Stuart Mill).

The bad news? Oh gee, people in "Developing Nations" earning less than minimum wage, there's gotta be a downside. Quick, let's send a reporter to photograph the dirty clothes their children wear, the mud huts, trash being burned at the Accra or Lagos landfill.  Because these jobs are available to people who can only afford a $20 used CRT monitor.   Yes... there's a photo of a burning computer monitor that needs to go into the article somewhere, or a "witches brew" of bad capacitors associated with the good enough market.

"Exploitation".

Sobering Next E-Waste Decade

The "e-waste trade" was mis-characterized from 2000-2010.  While about 15-30% of exports were scrapped, the scrap was not particularly dangerous (not found to cause the water pollution in Guiyu, and most lead poisoning comes from burning heavy insulated electric cable, not lead solder or CRT glass).  There was a lot of fodder to write about, in a debate whether the export glass was 80% empty or 80% full.

There is a change I can report on, from my trip to South America.

da pond ain't so small, eh?

During most of the past decade, the USA, Europe and Japan represented "the only game in town" for large scale refurbishing factories.  Contract manufacturers (takeback) operated 3-shifts per day, refurbishing and upgrading white-box computers and displays for "good enough" markets in India and China.  They depended on wealthy nations with 10 years of surplus in order to operate at scale and meet demand, just as they had depended on those nations as consumers for their scale of manufacturing in the 1990s.

When California took itself off the market, it had supply-demand effects on NJ and VT, because there were only so many places a buyer could go for the supply.   Forced to buy from less reputable suppliers (as during any prohibition), quality of imports actually suffered due to the West's anti-export campaign.

During that period, China and India did indeed have their own e-waste and surplus, but it wasn't enough to actually export out of country.  What was generated domestically was used or recycled or disposed of domestically, in Dharvi or Guiyu.

That last part is changing.  We are not the only game in town.  My trip to South America really brought the changes home.