LCCS: You Get What You Pay For (and in Consumer Markets, Expect to Pay More)
As I look at rising prices for cheap imported items like this, I find fascinating how long it's taking our expectations to catch up with market realities. Mattel and others have given us precisely what we’ve wanted from China and nothing more. And that's cheap prices. In industrial supply markets (e.g., automotive, A&D, etc.) China quality has amounted to exactly what the buying organization is willing to invest in. If they've wanted just cheap prices -- like toy importers -- that's what they've gotten. But the majority of those who have invested in quality, audit and supplier development programs have realized not only lower prices, but acceptable -- and in some cases exceptional -- quality levels as well. After all, you get out of China sourcing -- and global sourcing, for that matter -- exactly what you invest in it.
- Jason Busch
Thanks to the miracle of black holes, you can get as much energy as you want if you can simply find a way to control the particle fountains that exist on the surface and make sure the positive matter particles fly outward and the negative anti-matter particles fly inward. Since all processes can be controlled by a finite amount of energy, and this can be repeated an infinite number of times, producing an infinite amount of energy, you can definately get more out than you put in if you're a physicist!
Alternatively, thanks to the fact that markets don't correct for over indulgences instantaneously, you can get more out than you put in the stock-market as well if you get lucky. (Of course, due to the randomness, you can also get a lot less out than you put in.)
And as a final example, I give you the US economy for most of the past 10 years ... seems to me there was a lot more value placed on what was coming out than there should have been based on what was being put in. (Of course, the economy is now paying for it ... but still ...)
Of course, you can place a time window on your argument and use a balancing argument and partially cancel out my third example, but thanks to inflation, my second example still appears to hold.
Contrarily yours.