Pause for Editing

I have about 9 unfinished blogs, too good to delete, but in need of editing.  So I'll simply repost a link to Adam Minter's blogs this week, which he did as a fill-in for James Fallows at the Atlantic.

Adam's post today, about scrap value of motors, was his 7th of seven.   The photos were taken in Foshan, the same scrap market area I visited near Guangzhou in 2002 - A century ago.   People in the scrap business there could smell a piece of lab equipment with a 16 ounce nickel cylinder from 60 meters away.  The shelves Adam shows in his last post, of "motor samples" labelled with exact metals content, is echoed in the plastic markets of Ningbo, and the cell phone markets of Guanghzhou...  People in poor circumstances with hard work and active mind.   If I imagine myself born in Africa or Asia or Latin America, I'm doing the same thing.

In Guangzhou, I was struck by a city block of shops, a two story mall, of shop after shop after shop selling television repair equipment.  I don't mean "TV repair shops".  I mean shops which sold Sencore equipment.  The repair equipment that TV repairpeople need.  A city block of shops specializing in equipment needed only by TV repair shops.

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