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OT: What..no tables

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atomarc

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I posted a similar thread but it went nuts and was locked. This one will probably go nuts as well, but after 3 glasses of wine and some YouTube time I'm ready to go crazy.

The infamous 'Pakistani Videos' are cool, but why do they toss all the shit they make on the floor for the next dude to stoop over and pick up? After every process, the end product is tossed on the dirt floor, then picked up, processed some more, then tossed on the dirt floor, over and over.

If someone could introduce the concept of a table or workbench or tote of some sort they would become the slumlord millionaire.

There has to be someone that wonders "why is this shit dumped on the floor", only to be picked up by someone, then dumped again!

Stuart
 
One thing you notice about all those videos is that they rarely use tables or chairs at all. They do that Asia/India thing where you basically sit on your heels with your butt almost touching the ground. Watching guys in those videos weld and all kinds of other work for all intents and purposes sitting on the ground.

So, just saying their relationship to things on the ground might quite a bit different from a person born in the west were a table or workbench is a given for trade work.
 
It always amazes me, so called “ cultures” thousands of years old and no bloody benches, chairs etc, mud floors, come to think most of the cities and towns get reduced to rubble on the ground by wars, perhaps it’s what makes them happy?
I keep getting letters from water aid for towns with no mains water, hell Dubai is finally retro fitting sewers!, you’d think if you build the burge kalifa or whatever it is you’d build the bloody drains first, there must be 1000 toilets in that thing, hindsight takes on a new meaning
Mark
 
An engineer my father spoke to many years ago,told the tale that he was involved in outsourcing work from the UK to India and visited many times. He was appalled that everyone was crouched on the floor, welding, counting parts and working on stuff. He insisted that for his next visit, tables were bought for these people.
Upon his next visit, the tables had been installed and everyone was squatted on their tops doing the work.
Just how it is I suppose.
 
One person who lives near me - a racist, xenophobe, and fly-wing puller offer - suggested it could be because they're less developed, dumber, and less advanced. That's right - they don't know shit. He told me when you allow religion to consume your life, you spend thousands of years praying 5 times a day instead of developing your skills and resources as a people. He seemed to think that explanation is more palatable than coming up with some pseudo-intellectual explanation that seeks to unfairly elevate their status out of a misguided sense of moral superiority. He told me that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

I told him he was a bad man, and pointed to all of the examples of fine Pakistani automobiles, buildings, engineering and architectural achievements, scientific contributions, music, and convenience stores to prove my point. Next month, I'm sponsoring a Pakistani family who is emigrating to the USA....I'm paying for it by raising his taxes and of course, they'll be moving into his neighborhood.
 
PPE whats that? I love foundry videos where they are pouring steel(?) with flip flops and no Glasses or gloves
And nobody dies how can that be? Oh Wait I think they call it COMMON SENSE!
 
This exact topic came up on here not too long ago.

My take is that in less-developed 3rd-world parts of the world, the idea of "this is MY shop. this is where I work," just isn't the same as in more fortunate parts of the world. It's not that they have a 'problem' with tables and PPG, it just isn't as much of an issue as getting your work done, when tomorrow your shop might be bombed or your family might starve or your country might be overthrown. That's the extreme of course, and I'm not trying to get political about Pakistan or any other country, but it's a cultural carry over that boils down to priorities. Those same workers do a fantastic job of "fitting in" with western work practices when their needs are finally being met.

Also throw in that there has been very little (if any) industrial revolution in these countries. Most of their advancement has been shared from other countries, so while in the States or Europe, you'll have a skilled and individualistic mind who finds a whole new way to make machines do something for the community/country, in 3rd world countries it starts as old tools and skills spilling over from the 1st world and warm bodies just trying to get their necessities. Over time that changes and you get innovation, but it takes awhile and IMO there's no way to artificially make it happen. It's not a politics or humanitarian thing. It's just a basic fact of the human spirit. You can give them hand outs and free technology and it WILL make their lives better, but they won't start coming up with those things on their own if it's always given to them.
 
I grew up in a third world country where people just do things differently. Not the way we would, but it works for them.

Sometime in college I picked up a book about Confucius and was reading the forward. It said Confucius was fussy about having his mat straight with the room before he sat down. Then the book author explained that since chairs hadn't been invented yet, everyone sat on mats on the floor. It was glaringly obvious that the guy (or gal, let's be fair) was so focused on seeing everything from his/her own perspective or preferences it was unimaginable that anyone would sit on the floor if they had any choice.

It's easy to be blinded by what we grew up surrounded with, or know, or just prefer. Other cultures have made significant contributions to civilization, even if they sat differently. In an earlier thread it touched on the development of steel processing in different places. Arab, Islamic culture developed medicine and the concept of zero, The Chinese developed gunpowder. India developed plastic surgery.

It might be that we went for chairs to keep from freezing balls off in northern climates, something that wasn't a problem in many other parts of the world.
 
No taxpayer funded OSHA overlords telling the business owners what to do probably helps the profit margins a bit.
 
I suspect those from the Pakistani video just don't want to participate in the "Its New Year, who's for losing some weight?" thread.
 
Don't forget that in US factories, the complete time for an operation on a part was referred to as the "floor to floor time".

Look at pics of old US factories to find out why.
 
Two answers:
1. The floor is a very big table.
2. It's hard to use your feet for workholding on a table.

I see Americans in the central valley leaning over the side of their pickup truck to smoke and chat. I see Asians outside the haircutting training center squat on their heels to smoke and chat. Maybe they don't have pickup trucks.
 
"It's easy to be blinded by what we grew up surrounded with, or know, or just prefer. Other cultures have made significant contributions to civilization, even if they sat differently. In an earlier thread it touched on the development of steel processing in different places. Arab, Islamic culture developed medicine and the concept of zero, The Chinese developed gunpowder. India developed plastic surgery."


This is precisely the kind of pseudo-intellectual bullshit my neighbor warned me about. It's not an issue of being blinded by what we are used to; it's an issue of being blinded by, and having our ears filled up with, bullshit. Here's a concept - sometimes things are actually just flat better than others. No need for 'other perspectives' or 'reimagining.

The contributions to society made by Middle Eastern cultures are dwarfed by those of European, North American, Asian, and even Latin American cultures. It's not even close.

We can smear all the lipstick we want on a pig, but that doesn't make it a 30 year old Andie McDowell. People the world over work in lousy conditions for some very simple reasons - they don't have better conditions, and/or they don't know any better.
 
An engineer my father spoke to many years ago,told the tale that he was involved in outsourcing work from the UK to India and visited many times. He was appalled that everyone was crouched on the floor, welding, counting parts and working on stuff. He insisted that for his next visit, tables were bought for these people.
Upon his next visit, the tables had been installed and everyone was squatted on their tops doing the work.
Just how it is I suppose.

I watched a lot of those youtube videos showing industry in Pakistan. They did know what they were doing, even if their products and methods were not up to US/EU standards. But what struck me was how they had adapted standard methods to local conditions.

For instance, the maker of wooden bowls did indeed have a purpose-built lathe built into the dirt floor, and the operator sat on the floor as well.

What one did not see in the video was that the lathe was operated using the feet, freeing the hands to handle the gouge and so on. It's their solution to the lack of a third hand.
 
It has only been about 100 years that first world factory workers began using safety glasses etc. Many states still do not require motorcycle helmets!
Bill D
 
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