The state of the economy at the street level

[qldfrog]

@Dona Ferentes So will this mean in the future for substandard product from China????

why substandard? You mean like your iphone or TV?
Cheaper if the importer wishes too, substandard if the importer decides to sell crap too, but more importantly maybe unavailable, delayed by months, unable to be customised and at the bottom of the priority
ah well, slums do not need custom triple layers glass panes..

 

[divs4ever]

@Dona Ferentes So will this mean in the future for substandard product from China????

if you pay the big bucks ( or gold bars ) i bet China can make some mighty fine stuff , but currently importers want to pay peanuts , so they get monkey crap ( but really cheap so the margins are great )

much the same for India , pay for quality and someone will try to make it for you ( remember we used to do the same thing to Japan before they wised up )

 

[Smurf1976]

Australia’s largest glass maker and only maker of architectural glass, Oceania Glass, has been placed in administration less than a year after successfully arguing China and Thailand were dumping cheap glass into the Australian market.

I'll take an educated guess that the cost of energy was almost certainly a factor here too.

Glass is pretty energy-intensive to make, it's a significant cost input.

 

[divs4ever]

I'll take an educated guess that the cost of energy was almost certainly a factor here too.

Glass is pretty energy-intensive to make, it's a significant cost input.

maybe the newer stuff , but they were making glass objects several centuries ago or was that more than 2000 years back ?

say the 1600's you still had coal and ( primitive ) blast furnaces

however several glass-making techniques have changed

 

[Smurf1976]

maybe the newer stuff , but they were making glass objects several centuries ago or was that more than 2000 years back ?

That would still have been energy-intensive. The heat to melt it has to come from somewhere.

The detail would've been very different back then but the basic concept remains. There's heat required in the process, and Australia's an expensive place to do that these days.

 

[sptrawler]

That would still have been energy-intensive. The heat to melt it has to come from somewhere.

The detail would've been very different back then but the basic concept remains. There's heat required in the process, and Australia's an expensive place to do that these days.

Yes radiant heat from burning fossil fuel, is extremely efficient when it comes to heat transfer, replicating that with renewables will not be easy in some processes.

 

[divs4ever]

That would still have been energy-intensive. The heat to melt it has to come from somewhere.

The detail would've been very different back then but the basic concept remains. There's heat required in the process, and Australia's an expensive place to do that these days.

we have plenty of coal , for instance NST has a Maules Creek size resource sitting inconveniently over a gold resource , goodness knows how much more we have if we were to look hard

what Australia DID do , was to make coal difficult and complicated to extract and use ( in Australia ) ( and expensive as well )