Re:Ask HN: Insider history of the demise of Kodak?
by ethbro on Monday July 18, 2016 @08:21AM
(#12114611)
Also notable that manufacturing at scale (including Kodak) has the side effect of leaving behind environmentally problematic Superfund sites. There's no way you're ever going to be able to compete with someone willing and able to externalize more costs than you.
Re:Ask HN: Insider history of the demise of Kodak?
by starky on Tuesday July 19, 2016 @01:45AM
(#12119994)
It isn't that some factories have people work, sleep, and live there, that is the standard of how factories operate over there. Most workers are from outside of the area, so they provide all this for them in addition to pay that they send back to the family in other provinces. Even the engineers I've worked with at these companies often live in the dorms during the week, even though they may have apartments elsewhere.
But they do exist in China. Plants in some cities dump sludge into wastelands the size of lakes. Some factories are small towns unto themselves where people work, sleep and live on company property.
We still need to the scale Kodak had for their market at the time, but economics has moved it overseas and the market is totally different.
It's still consumerism though, and a frightening scale. It's just abstracted away from most of the western world, so we don't see it.