Quote:
Originally Posted by mobertol
The sad effect of Globalisation...it's the same all over. If you go to Venice and want to buy some Murano glass as a souvenir, most of the small pieces are industrially made in China and imported into Italy -so much for hand-crafted Italian glass-wear traditionally going back centuries. Cremona (where I live) is a world center of excellence for the production of hand-made violins -at the Stradivarius International School for Violin Making in town, over half the students are Chinese or Koreans who then go back to their countries and apply the techniques they've learned to mass production -under-cutting the costs of what is made here so only the very top musicians can now afford a violin made here.
Cheap'n'cheerful has become a by-word for many but I still go by my Grand-mother's maxim which was to always buy the best quality you can afford and above all only to buy what you need and when you have saved up to buy it..
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Don't know too much about glassware .... apart from the fact that it holds alcoholic beverages
But the violin thing ... there is no reason that others, say the Italians even, do what the Asians do. It's not as if it is some evil plot on the part of the inscrutable Chinese. If Italian entrepreneurs got off their asses, it could be done in Italy. I mean, the Italians make great ships, cars, and, especially motorcycles ... they have the skills; those skills are just lying idle. I remember a line from a Pink Floyd song: "If it wasn't for the nips being so good at building ships, the yards would still be open on the Clyde", or something like that (as you know, when possible, I prefer to use my memory instead of Google
) I don't really agree with it. The skills of Clydeside were every bit as good as those of the Japs.
Talking of those wonderful folks who brought us Pearl Harbor, many over here buy Japanese automobiles. However, they are made in Canada, by Canadian workers. And because Japanese companies don't treat workers like sh ..., ok, poo
, there are no labour disruptions at their plants. At the time the US economy took a dump, and their auto makers were laying off Canadian workers, Toyota opened a couple of new plants in Ontario.
Oh, and both my vehicles are GM products ... yet both were made in Canada.