Its crazy innit!?!

2

2cents

i've got this slick dell laptop, inspiron etc, centrino duo blah, sitting there in the middle of the living room and its a lazy sunnyish sunday in tokyo... nathan hayes on the stereo, closely followed by barramundi... wife off to beauty salon... in a moment i'll be on the terrace, cold 'shin nama' asahi in hand, watching kids play footie on the pitch down there... but right now there's this thing thats bugging me....

this laptop i know was assembled in china... but where did the parts come from?... there's quite a few parts aren't there?... and wherever they came from, who assembled them? in which countries?... and the raw materials for the casing, circuitry, components etc, where are they from? who mined them, who chopped the trees my user guide was printed on?... ever opened a paper user guide? what a bloody waste... well lets not digress... and who put them into the boxes hauled them around the planet and delivered at my front door with a smile? anybody got a chart of that? the whole bloody chain... movement of physicals, cash, people... how much these guys making a day? mmmhhh, can't be much now can it?

just curious... {yawn} ok whatever, beer time! :)
 
Before Bit and his Chinese copyright attorney morph the thread any further there are answers to the questions.
Very roughly outlined:
The raw materials have to be mined, mostly Indonesia,South America, Canada, U.S, Russia. These are generally huge international public co's. Oil is simply another form of mining. Then plant products, trees. We have to tear up the earth to get at any of these. These guys all live in a wierd box, nothing can exist without them but unless there is demand ( somebody spending $$) what they have diminishes in value, so they have to deal with wide price fluctuations and risk.
Stage 2 of this phase turns raw material into usable products, bauxite into aluminum, iron ore into steel, crude into petroleum byproducts, all plastics start out as chemicals turned into small pellets.
First stages of manufacturing are known as "value added". A co. takes pellets and creates motherboards or aluminum and machines aircraft parts. Yet another co. installs circuits on the boards or bends glass into windshields. These are all value added functions in the chain. This is where China has been living, no big $$ in these functions.
Assembly is the last value added function.
Where the money is: selling the completed product, creating a brand that creates a revenue stream. Dell makes more per laptop than all the mfg step funtions combined. This is why China bought IBM pc, Lenovo, to complete the chain. Problem on this level is creating and maintaining reputation in the eyes of the consumer, postitioning in the marketplace.
Advertizing/marketing, nothing happens without it. Who the hell started serving food on airplanes anyway, they're not restaraunts.
 
Quote from Banjo:

Advertizing/marketing, nothing happens without it. Who the hell started serving food on airplanes anyway, they're not restaraunts.
More...
thanks Banjo for the nice snapshot view of the extraordinary maelstrom required to make me want the latest laptop AND deliver it to my front door... consumo ergo sum indeed :)

re airplane food though, seems the need originated in the army as for tons of things that have made their way into our everyday lives... but yeah, its advertising that propelled that stuff onto our laps... http://www.loc.gov/rr/scitech/mysteries/tvdinner.html

just bumped into this btw, some fun stuff in there!: http://www.foodtimeline.org/

anything else on the homo consumus paradigm anybody?
 
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