Fair trade

What is your regions greatest export and what do you import the most?

Do you consider it fair or not? Or do you make the effort to buy things locally?

I was thinking about this as I noticed all the photocopy paper in the bookshop I work in came from Australia. Im like what, why have we imported Australian Paper when we have our own papermills in New Zealand. Isnt our own paper good enough to keep and sell domestically? Or maybe Australian paper is cheaper?

anyway, just wondering. Since that shipping container got stuck in the canal (its now free) I expect that all those material things are now reaching their destinations.

My car is from Japan, this ipad is from China and the bed linens are from India. The Bible is from England. The Olives are from spain. I think the only thing that isnt imported from somewhere else is the water and the air.

But I am sure that people are finding a way to export those. I suppose there will alwas be some people figuring out that they should sell ice to eskimos and coals to newcastle. Maybe we just dont value our own things enough or have too much of it that we wanna give it all away.

The chinese weaponized virus attack on the world should have us drawing back in and supporting our own.

its a virus, its not an attack. Viruses spread, thats what they do. They arent actually deliberately spread, and there have been virus and pest and diseases wherever there has been trade.

China invented a lot of things like paper, the best cuisine in the world, and gunpowder (that was originally meant as fireworks, not weapons of mass destruction). It had tea and silk. It was a nation self sufficient in food to feed billions of their own people.

In fact, the British tried to get its silk, tea, and porcelain and in return all it gave China was opium. China was like what kind of trade is this?! But no, the Brits insisted because they had nothing else to offer, cos at that point in history the Brits had no gold. (in goldmines..they just stole it from somewhere else and didnt actually want to pay the Chinese in gold coins) Hence setting up colonies like Hong Kong which were basically drug cartels!

The silk Road was established because of the demand for this material that other nations had no idea how to make, plus the mulberry trees would not grow in colder climates.

I was interested in cotton though. The south of the usa built its empire on King Cotton. But it used slavery on its massive plantations. However the demand for cotton is as high today as it ever was, although thankfully, without the fashion for ridiculously huge skirts and crinolines that women used to wear. But today we dont get any cotton at all from the US spinning in the Uks satanic mills. It all comes from India.

it was a virus created through "gain of function" genetic experimentation to create a weaponized virus.

I'm in west Tennessee. Our main export is Jack Daniel's whiskey.

Actually our main export seems to be assorted small parts that go in big machines. You can't spit without hitting a factory that is making car parts or parts for CAT or lawnmower parts or just any old kind of parts that will go to some other factory.

UGH!

Do you have to hijack EVERY thread for your covid/mask/vaccine diatribes?

"Oooh, there's a thread about "Your Favorite Toys When You Were Growing Up!" A lot of toys come from China. I could use that to start talking about the China virus!"

You're like that one guy at the party who attaches himself to conversations just so he can hijack them and rant about the political figure he hates.

"Sure aren't a lot of sprinkles on the donuts here."
"I know, right! Thanks a lot Bernie Sanders! If it weren't for his proposed economic policies scaring investors away they wouldn't have had to start skimping on the sprinkles. They wouldn't have NEEDED to skimp!"
"Dude, that election was over years ago. And he didn't even win."
"I know, that's how bad his economic policies are! The effects are still being felt to this day!"

USA seems to be the leading manufacturer of weapons, mostly guns, nuclear weaponry, bombs and missiles. Saudi arabia imports most of these. Lockheed Martin based in USA produces billions of dollars worth of armaments every year.


I dont think anything good comes of this trade in weapons.

we are talking about trade here. For trade to happen there must be agreement and transaction between both parties. I dont know what the deal is between the USA and Saudi Arabia. Persumably The US gets its oil from them even when they already have their own oil fields.

Nz biggest export is meat - beef and lamb, followed by dairy products. milk, cheese, yoghurt etc.
Then its pine logs. From the biggest pine plantation in the world.

I wonder if the US eats our beef in their hamburgers. Or maybe every countries beef gets sent to them and it all gets ground up together.

Here's a list of the top 10 products exported by US in 2020.

https://www.worldstopexports.com/united-states-top-10-exports/

And weapons aren't even in the top ten...

Number 1 is machinery? Thats a bit of a vague catch all term.
I wonder if it can be more specific . Does that include machine guns.

Im reading a short history of farming in new Zealand.

It was wool until the invention of refrigeration and then it was lamb and beef. And now milk, butter and cheese. Dairy workers had to figure out how to best make cheese. I recall when there was only one brand of butter and one brand of cheese. (?!)

Fair trade works by suppliers paying maunfacturers a subsidy or fee to ensure that workers are getting a fair price for their work. Factory work and mechanisation makes things more efficient, but I think if you are too successful and have a surplus and nobody wants it, then you also have a problem. Mass manufactuing and production has its benefits but also its drawbacks.

The other thing is when other countries dump their unwanted and inferior goods on another. I wouldnt call that fair. More like a rip off.

I dunno... I do that all the time with computers. I don't want this old computer because I just bought a better one, and I know somebody (who is a normal person, not a nerd) who can use this computer for normal-person stuff like facebook and youtube, so I dump the old computer on that person.

That's not a rip-off. That's effective use of available resources. Should the surplus instead rot in a warehouse? Or in the case of my analogy, should the laptop instead collect dust in my attic?

computers get viruses too.

I think the "dumping" refers to countries who target certain industries by flooding the market with products sold under the cost of production to drive the importers industries out of business.

Not my computers. Linux is naturally immune.

be aware that may change-https://www.makeuseof.com/linux-vulnerable-to-malware/

Pfft! Amateurs. All those things target users' habits. To get malware to run on Linux you have to get out and push, so they have to use social engineering to make users get out and push.

Besides, I have the ultimate security of not really giving a fart in a whirlwind. All I care about is my data - mostly my music collection and recipes - and I have that backed up in quad. Solid state storage is insanely cheap these days.

If my computer DID get hacked and held for ransom or trashed, I wouldn't care a bit. My system is installed on a flash drive. I would wipe the whole system and reinstall from an .iso or just run from a different flash drive install. Even if something somehow damaged the hardware, I'd just switch to a different laptop and keep running.

The ultimate security is not having to care about security.

on fair trade

I was reeadinga John Grisham book about picking cotton. Its called A Painted House.
yes, I kmow he writes legal thrillers but he had this book set in his childhood on a farm where they were not poor share croppers but they owned some land and had leased some poor land in Arkansas, growing cotton, which must be harvested over six weeks and sent to the cotton gin.

To get the harvest in, they needed to pay workers to come and live on the land and harvest it every day before it rained or got too cold. They got hill people in from the hill country in tenessee, and Mexicans from Mexico.

Its an interesting story, but the thing is when the rivers began to flood that was the end of their crop. If you had put all your money into one crop it could be devasted in 3 days with a big flood.

A lot of people that farmed did not want to stay farming forever, cos its a hard life when its dependant on the vagaries of the weather. In this story, several workers ran away up North to work in the car factories. Even the family of the boy made the decision to leave the farm (it was the grandparents farm). The boy was picking bales of cotton and he was only 7 years old. When you live on a farm you start work young, you need all the hands you can get.

I have read quite a few books authored by John Grisham but it's been a few years.