I just saw a post over on Manufacturer’s Blog and couldn’t help but question it. Go read it for yourself (Link) and then come back and read the comment I submitted here:

I’m curious. I saw similar comments on some news show a couple of years ago where a manager in India said he didn’t understand why Americans were concerned when his own office was filled with American equipment. The only problem was that the stuff he pointed to was American *branded* equipment (I know because I know the products); they were actually being manufactured in China.

I then checked a .gov website to confirm comments about the trade numbers being touted. But what I found were flat numbers for private industry and a booming export business for the U.S. government (I suspect the U.S. was selling mothballed military equipment, which – when I was in the Navy – I found to {be} relatively common and which would have coincided with the tensions between India and Pakistan around that time). But again, that was a couple of years ago.

In any case, based on that information I can’t help but be skeptical that “GE, and Whirlpool, and Westinghouse” are selling American-made products in India. The *companies* may be doing business, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s American workers at GE, Whirlpool and Westinghouse plants in the U.S. that are benefitting. More than likely, it’s shareholders who reap the benefits of this sort of arrangement.

Could you verify this to ensure that those companies are actually selling only American-made products to India? For my part, I’ll be looking into whether those large kitchen appliances being manufactured in the U.S. are making the long, expensive journey to India. Seems to me like they’re shipping a lot of air if that’s the case.

and a second comment

Sorry. Also wanted to ask how much of Texas Instruments’ overseas revenue is making its way back to the U.S. and into our economy? Or is all that money being re-invested in overseas research centers, overseas manufacturing sites and so on? I don’t see that there is necessarily a link between their overseas success and American workers other than more jobs are moving overseas to take advantage of lower wages, lower health care costs, lower government standards, greater government incentives and (tbh) reports of widespread corruption.

I wonder if blogger Pat Cleary will reply.

Terra Nova has a post relaying some interesting news. From the entry (Link):

DoNews is reporting that several Wengzhou companies are recruiting gamers to play online games. … The basic salary for these gamers is 800 Yuan per month, said the report … For comparison, 800 yuan is 99.50 US at today’s exchange rate.

And if you read the second half of the entry, one can imagine that these gamers might wind up using hijacked accounts. It’d certainly be one way to get a pharming business up and running.

I read something over on BusinessWeek yesterday about people in Asia being especially innovative in a system with few safety nets. Quite a few people who commented took issue with that observation. But I guess that word can be broadly applied. Until we walk in their shoes…

I’ve been following an entry over on Raph Koster’s blog (Link) discussing the MySpace phenomenon. There are some interesting comments that are worth reading imo. The most recent comment as of this writing included this bit:

I think the first step between connecting a MMOG with a true social network is to grow it FROM an existing social network and allow a virtualization of that social network into a visual representation.

Interesting. I guess by going from Second Life to LinkedIn I’m doing this all backwards (see earlier post for reference – Link). I’ve not actively pursued making virtual person-to-virtual person contacts on LinkedIn; no time at the moment. Perhaps next week.

btw, would a cover of The Who classic song now use the lyric “don’t try to grok what we all s-s-say”?

There’s an interesting review of Adobe’s new Acrobat 3D application over on CGArchitect. I don’t know anyone that’s using it yet, but I assume that it will work its way into some product development toolsets; although at US $995 I don’t see it finding space in mine any time soon. Anyway, here’s the part of the review that caught my attention (Link):

There is also a third, more direct way for AEC users to get 3D content into Acrobat 3D from those CAD and BIM applications that support the OpenGL rendering mode. This is through the built-in 3D Capture utility, based on an OpenGL model capture technology developed by a French company, OKYZ, that Adobe acquired in December 2004. It allows users to quickly capture a 3D file displayed on screen in OpenGL mode and convert it to Adobe PDF.

Does that sound like anything I’ve been playing with? (*cough* … OGLE … *cough*).

Perhaps I should email the author, Lachmi Khemlani, and tell her to try it instead. Between OGLE and a free model viewer (like plyview, perhaps), that $995 is looking pretty outlandish … especially since grabbing the videostream data like that has been around for years.

For those hoping for, working toward, and dreaming beyond the eventual legitimization of online 3D for things other than games, this news from Next Generation (Link) will doubtlessly signal that day is near:

EA along with rock mainstays Depeche Mode have teamed up to translate the band’s song “Suffer Well” to the language of The Sims, otherwise known as “Simlish”. The song will be available through The Sims 2 expansion pack, Open for Business.

What am I going to write now that could remotely compete with that?