Hard News: From Saigon
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I did see a group of Vietnamese fishermen outside your place looking very embarrassed.
Heh. If only.
After a brief, glorious hour of being about to send as well as receive email, I am back to being able to do neither. Can't login to webmail either. I do not feel well served by Ihug.
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Also if flying AirNZ, you get to travel to AKL on the 777 which is a much more roomy and modern airplane than the workhorse 747-400s that ply the LAX route.
777s are the business. Looking forward to the 787. I did have a nice time on an A340-600 the other day, but the service (Virgin) was nowhere near as good as AirNZ.
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Air NZ? Service? You must have been flying Business Class then?
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777s are the business
It depends on the 777....the short haul ones used by Singapore are cramped and horrible, whereas the long haul layout is fantastic. But its worth remembering that it's only the threat of Airbus that has forced Boeing to take a step forward from the tin can approach. My first flights on an Airbus many years back were eye openers.
In the same way it was only the fact that there other airlines up there that finally forced Air New Zealand to offer, in the last year or so, the sort of inflight entertainment that most of the world's trans-oceanic airlines have offered for a decade and a half.
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Air NZ? Service? You must have been flying Business Class then?
No, unfortunately not! However the aircraft was only 75% full. Everything is relative, but I found it better than Virgin, and Qantas for that matter. Admittedly I haven`t flown Singapore for years, and probably won't, either.
It depends on the 777....the short haul ones used by Singapore are cramped and horrible, whereas the long haul layout is fantastic. But its worth remembering that it's only the threat of Airbus that has forced Boeing to take a step forward from the tin can approach. My first flights on an Airbus many years back were eye openers.
Sounds like the short haul 747s used in Japan?
I don't know about the tin can analogy - it is up to the airlines how they configure the individual aircraft. Absolutely true in that competition from Airbus has helped Boeing along, and they seem to be doing much better of it recently, too. The A380 seems unproven and the A350 (answer to the 787) isn't generating nearly as much interest, or orders.
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getting back to growing business in vietnam, what are the labour laws like? minimum wage? maximum hours? health & safety reulations - how many workplace deaths & injuries do they have?
i had a debate last week with a couple who were spouting about the ease of doing business in asia compared to here. but my question was: who exactly is paying for that ease of doing business, and is that cost worth it?
i'm all for trade links and better business opportunities overseas - as long as there is some assurance of minimum standards and no exploitation of people who are too poor to demand basic protection.
would be interested in your views russell, while you're over there, on such matters.
on a related note, i'd be really interested in a socially responsible investment fund for kiwisaver purposes. does anyone know of any products of this kind?
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Raffe, The reason the the A350 isn't attracting orders yet is that the design isn't finalised..rather simple. There is no doubt that the 787 is the star of the skies right now, but its a program driven by the fear of Airbus, even Boeing admit that.
My tin can analogy holds true in that, yes its up to the airlines to configure, but, it was Airbus that offered the viable, economic configurations that added customer comfort into the mix when Boeing seemed only to offer variable sardine options. I have to take an aisle seat on most 73/4/5/67s as I have to put my knees somewhere, and I'm only 6'1" which is not a unusual height in the western world.
Boeing, in the eighties, after McDonnell Douglas defacto withdrew, thought they had a global monopoly and customer comfort took second place to trying to squeeze as many bodies on to as small a space as possible. The philosophy that Air NZ seemed to follow until last year.
I'd still rather fly on an A3anything than any Boeing other than a late model 777.
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Roho,
Actually, Singapore is quite anal about terrorists. Armed police are present at the lovely airport and if you ride the newer MRT lines you'll be able to watch incessant public awareness videos (in all 4 official languages) about what to do if you see a mysterious package left on the carriage and people acting suspiciously, etc. At least, that was the case when I was there in October. Russell, I hope you have some expat friends in Singapore who can show you some good eatin' and I don't just mean Newton Circus etc. If not I can hook you up.
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Word, Anjum.
And putting aside the effects of offshoring on blue collar NZers and Vietnamese, very little of the windfalls of the slashing of labour and environmental compliance costs seem to have been passed on to consumers.
Icebreaker and Macpac clothing, Fisher and Paykel products (for example) just don't seem that much cheaper in light of the reduction in costs those firms would have experienced...
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Very good point Anjum. I was about to ask myself: Russell, when you say:
What Vietnam offers, he says, is "scale and speed": back home, you
can't go from 100 employees to 6000. Here, it's an option.Where exactly does that "scale and speed" come from, who pays for it, and who benefits? There's more to being on the left than supporting civil unions and buying Fair Trade. Start buying into this right-wing low-wage outsourcing crap and you might as well join the BlueLibs.
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man.. no email from ihug for two days either.
bull.shit.non-service...
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Where exactly does that "scale and speed" come from, who pays for it, and who benefits? There's more to being on the left than supporting civil unions and buying Fair Trade. Start buying into this right-wing low-wage outsourcing crap and you might as well join the BlueLibs.
So you're going to tell anyone in a country where wages are lower than New Zealand they can't play? How would you like it if the US or Europe took the same attitude to New Zealand? Do you approve of what the US trade regulator is doing to Vietnam at the moment - ie: declaring that the Vietnamese apparel trade is "dumping" and holding hundreds of small businesses over a barrel?
I don't think this is simple. Yes, wages here are low, and so is the cost of living. But wages in Vietnam have doubled in the past decade, there is a minimum wage and, in many ways, stronger labour laws than those in New Zealand.
I think political freedom is a much bigger issue - and that includes the fact that the trade unions are sponsored by the government, which has been known to fudge. But when 40,000 workers staged wildcat strikes in 2005, the government moved, and the minimum wage went up. In the 1990s, Nike was successfully shamed into improving its woeful labour practices here - that's a good thing.
If Vietnam is able to produce skilled IT workers while we churn out ever more lawyers, then good luck to them. These are entrepreneurial people working inside a command economy, and cutting them off at the knees - for their own good, of course - doesn't seem very kind to me.
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Wow. Just spent a couple of hours having layers of meaning explained to me by Kevin Miller, a Japanese-American blogger, former non-profit volunteer and Linux guy. It's a complicated place.
Point of interest: the guy whos' screwing his workers is most likely to be either a returning expat Vietnamese or perhaps a Korean.
Also: demand continues to exceeed supply of labour in IT, and local staff will come and go at will - churn's a big problem. They earn up to $US1000 ($1500 tops) per month, which is quite a tasty wage here.
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Labour churn is a similar problem in Indian IT jobs, where salaries have risen 10% each year recently.
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Marcus Neiman wrote:
> very little of the windfalls of the slashing of labour and
> environmental compliance costs seem to have been passed on to
> consumers.> Icebreaker and Macpac clothing, Fisher and Paykel products (for
> example) just don't seem that much cheaper in light of the reduction
> in costs those firms would have experienced...The price of those things will only ever be what the market will bear, so it doesn't really surprise me that prices haven't gone done.
What does surprise me is that the market continues to bear the price. F&P, sure, every yuppie in the US wants their dishdrawer right now. But Icebreaker? What are they selling, now?
What I bought, as I was amassing my Icebreaker collection[*] was clothing that was cute, warm, and strongly tied to New Zealand. Every time I went home to NZ I would come back laden with Icebreaker gifts. How much have I bought for myself and others since they offshored? Zero. How much do I ever expect to buy again? Zero.
It's not astonishingly difficult to make a cute merino sweater, a fact not lost on a lot of new labels. Or even on some of the old ones. In my suitcase this summer? (What room there was left after MadCat, Plush, and Fin).... Norsewear.
Ok, fine, and Toffee Pops.
[*] Not an obscenely large pile, but certainly more than I own of any other single brand. -
Point of interest: the guy whos' screwing his workers is most likely to be either a returning expat Vietnamese or perhaps a Korean.
And it's women who run the brothels in SE Asia too. Crusty old mama-san's who lived the life themselves. Well at least that's how the media portray it, since I've never actually been near one.
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