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Comment by davidbanham | Hacker News Reader

Did anyone else feel a bit uneasy with the racist undertone? The author seemed to dismiss out of hand that "Chinese or Mexicans" could do any kind of skilled labour. There is a fair amount of high tech work done in Asia these days.

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The adversarial tone of international vs. domestic manufacturing was probably due to compassion for the "Maddies" of the US. True, there seemed to be no care for the "Maddies" outside of the US giving it an "us vs. them" feel. Not necessarily racist, but overly patriotic perhaps?

If anything this phrase caused me a furrowing of the brow "the Gildemeisters and their ilk".

I didn't get a sense of any racist undertone in this article (nor was there any in the Planet Money podcast about this either). Certainly the author could have gone into more detail as to why the company doesn't feel that they can find enough skilled labor in China or Mexico to make it worth their while to move production there, but that's not the point of the article, so why focus on it?

The public perception curve for developing Asian countries in America goes something like this:

Ridicule -> Dismissal -> Contempt -> Acceptance -> Reverence

Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Thailand, China, all fall on different points on that progression, Japan being the most far along of course.

JP is well into 'reverence', SK and Taiwan are firmly at the 'acceptance' phase, China is still somewhere between 'dismissal' and 'contempt'. Expect it to be solidly in 'contempt' by 2015-2020.

Whether or not they can shed the "sure they're smart but not creative" label depends on how amenable their popular culture and cuisine is to American tastes. Patents filed, product innovations, or pure research conducted is not taken into consideration.

I didn't feel any kind of racism in this article. There were some points that may have used a little more explanation, but definitely no issue on racism.

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