Kevin Pezzi, MD

Disagree with something I wrote? So do I! Read more

“To avoid criticism, do nothing, say nothing, and be nothing.”

— Elbert Hubbard, American editor, publisher, and writer (1856–1915)

Trivia: He and his wife, Alice Moore Hubbard, the noted feminist and writer, died aboard the RMS Lusitania, which was torpedoed and sunk by a German submarine on May 7, 1915, when they were heading to Europe to cover the war and interview Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany.

If you disagree with something I wrote, feel free to challenge it. Some of my viewpoints are the antithesis (exact opposite) of what they once were. That isn't flip-flopping; that is changing opinions with scant evidence to support them into convictions with a firmer foundation of facts.

My political philosophy is an amalgamation of libertarian, conservative, and liberal principles. My opinions have changed so significantly that my conservative friends might be horrified by how I strongly believe that liberals are correct on certain issues. I've previously written about some of them, but to make this more fun, I will present others as challenges in which I offer $100,000 to the first person who can refute the logic I used in forming that opinion. Please note that due to my limited time and difficulty using my hands after I broke my neck, I cannot quickly update my previously published opinions. However, now that I am balancing the promptings of head and heart, I strongly disagree with many opinions I expressed in my writings.

I like finding people who make me think, not necessarily those who agree with me. Genius Robert Heinlein said, “I never learned from a man who agreed with me.” If you can educate me, I'm all ears.

“Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.”
— Albert Einstein

“Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.”
— Albert Einstein

“The ultimate ignorance is the rejection of something you know nothing about and refuse to investigate.”
— Dr. Wayne Dyer

“If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn't thinking.”
— General George Patton

“Man's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.”
— Oliver Wendell Holmes

“A lot of people risk their lives in a brief act of heroism, which is kind of cool, but Jill has what I call slow heroism. She is risking her professional life on something that her own calculations show may not work for a thousand years—may not ever. So I like to support people that are risking their lives.”
— ex-Microsoft billionaire brainiac Nathan Myhrvold speaking about Jill Tarter, who inspired the character played by Jodie Foster in the movie Contact. It takes a brilliant person to see that others who go against the grain of conventional wisdom may be sages although lesser minds often ridicule their ideas.

“I am not young enough to know everything.”
— Oscar Wilde

“You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life.”
— Winston Churchill

“Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish.”
— Euripides, Greek tragic dramatist (484 BC - 406 BC)

“It is socially unacceptable to be right too early.”
— Robert Heinlein

“I'd rather stand alone on the truth than with millions on a lie.”

“The most distinctive mark of a cultured mind is the ability to take another's point of view; to put one's self in another's place, and see life and its problems from a point of view different from one's own. To be willing to test a new idea; to be able to live on the edge of difference in all matters intellectually; to examine without heat the burning question of the day; to have imaginative sympathy, openness and flexibility of mind, steadiness and poise of feeling, cool calmness of judgment, is to have culture.”
— Arthur H. R. Fairchild

“It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.”
— Theodore Roosevelt

“It has been my experience that folks who have no vices have very few virtues.”
— Abraham Lincoln

This reminds me of something stressed by one of my psychology professors, who said that society imposes rigid boundaries for what behavior is acceptable, and applies tremendous pressure trying to force people to conform to the behavioral expectations. Some of the most brilliant and productive outside-the-box thinkers led unconventional lives. One of the side effects of forcing people to think inside the box is that by lopping off outside-the-box behavior, potentially great outside-the-box ideas are lost, too.

“We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. When the loyal opposition dies, I think the soul of America dies with it.”
— Edward R. Murrow, American journalist (1908-1965)

“You will not do incredible things without an incredible dream.”
— John Eliot

NOTE: Several family members were brutally slaughtered recently, so I will take a break from writing. Their deaths erased my affinity for writing about politics or the economy, thus I'll later limit myself to health and brainpower in addition to completing my book on rapidly overcoming racism and bigotry. BTW, the two men who murdered my father are still on the lam; I am offering up to $100,000 for information leading to their arrest and conviction.

Made-in-China junk

Like other consumers, I once welcomed low-cost products from China. Paying less seemed to be a dream come true enabling me to have more stuff.

Then I woke up and realized that Chinese goods are often not a dream come true, but a nightmare of shoddy stuff that often performs poorly, breaks prematurely, or is toxic.

I won't paint with a broad brush and claim they're all junk, but a distressing percentage are. I usually have at least one or two made-in-China products fail per week. That wastes money, time, and fills our landfills with stuff that lasted much longer back in the days when it was made in Japan, America, Germany, or Canada. In 1969, a Canadian company, Bombardier, made a Ski-doo snowmobile I have that still runs like new despite 42+ years of use, abuse, and neglect. The beating snowmobiles take is much greater on a per-mile or per-hour basis than cars, so for a snowmobile to last that long is a testament to their superb quality.

I've never been disappointed by any product I purchased from Bosch, a German company. All of them scream quality. If they made junk like that made in China, they would break out in hives and heads would roll. Interestingly, Bosch is a multinational corporation with a small fraction of its workforce in China. This demonstrates that Chinese workers aren't the problem; the problem is the Chinese corporate culture that thinks backward engineering, substandard materials, and poor quality are perfectly reasonable ways to boost profits.

The ultimate net price we pay for all those seeming bargains from China is almost certainly higher that what we'd pay for better quality but initially more expensive items from other countries. That's one reason why the Chinese economy is booming while ours is faltering. Do the math. The problem is that too many people cannot; their mental wheels get stuck after seeing a low price they equate with being a great bargain, but paying less for junk is no bargain. In fact, it can be very expensive.

If so, please tell me about it.

For example, two years ago I purchased a made-in-China switch that cost $10. It worked fine for a few months, then bizarre problems arose. Electrically, it is what's called a “normally open” switch in which a spring keeps the contacts open until the user presses a button—in this case, to start an engine. If you had a similar switch controlling a light, and the switch operated properly, the light would come on only when you pressed the button. As soon as you stopped pressing the button, the illumination would cease. If the switch I purchased controlled the light, it would occasionally come on when the button was not pushed, and often not come on when the button was pushed. In other words, the button acts as if it has a mind of its own controlled by a mischievous poltergeist.

I spent hours repeatedly troubleshooting other components in the system, finding they all worked fine. When I tested the switch, I confirmed it to be the source of the problem. Replacing it will take about 30 minutes and necessitate waiting until I next go to town for some other reason, or going for this part only, burning $20 of gas and an hour of time.

A switch like that used as infrequently as I did should last for at least a decade. If the lifespan of that switch were assumed to be three months, I'd need 40 similar switches every decade, thus making that $10 switch effectively cost $400 per 10 years of use. A good quality switch made in Japan or the USA might cost $20, but last for 10, 20, 30, or more years (I built devices 35 years ago using made-in-Japan switches that are still perfectly fine). Therefore, the cost per decade for a good quality switch is $20 and likely much less.

Now factor in the troubleshooting and replacement time, along with the associated costs, and the switch from China that seemed to be a great bargain turned out to be much more expensive, wasting time and money, and on several days depriving me of the use of the device it controlled. For that needless stress and inconvenience, I didn't save any money by using a made-in-China switch; instead, I will ultimately pay considerably more.

If this were the first time this happened, or even the tenth time, I wouldn't bother writing about it. However, I've had hundreds of other premature failures from made-in-China products that cannot be explained away as a statistical anomaly. My experience conforms with what others have noticed: that products made in China are indeed more likely to prematurely malfunction or die. To get their bargains, we're paying a big price.

Imagine a new restaurant chain, McChina, offered food for half the usual cost. It looked and tasted the same as other food, and it filled you up. Seeking such an apparently good way to economize, Americans might flock to McChina outlets. In time, struggling McAmerica or McJapan restaurants would go out of business, making people dependent on McChina restaurants: eat there or go hungry. Or make your own food . . . ha, ha, ha!

Then people belatedly recognized a big problem: McChina food was initially as filling as anything else, but it didn't keep you full for long; you'd soon be hungry, so you'd soon be spending money to eat again. You spent less per meal on McChina fare but more per year as a result of needing more meals to keep you going. You also wasted more time and gasoline on those extra visits to McChina.

Oh, there was another problem with McChina food: it created other problems, leaving you with foggy thinking and diseases that kept your doctor busy. Desperate to avoid the McChina bargain food, which proved to be too expensive to afford, you and others sought to return to McAmerica or McJapan restaurants, but there weren't any.

You were hooked on junk, but educated in the School of Hard Knocks lesson that a low price is not synonymous with a bargain.

When I was very young, “made in Japan” was virtually a synonym for junk, but before long, that phrase signaled superb product quality and engineering. Consequently, making junk might be a phase a country goes through before it matures and makes good stuff. We've seen this with other countries, so we might see it with China, too. However, Japan and those other nations were competing for customers who could go elsewhere to get what they wanted to buy. In contrast, today's consumers often don't have a choice: after figuratively eating at McChina for so long, there is no McAmerica or McJapan alternative. Eat at McChina or go hungry.

Case study: Electrical tape made in China versus US

Few products are simpler than electrical tape, but Chinese manufacturers can't even get that right. Hoping to save money, I purchased made-in-China electrical tape from two big-box lumber warehouses instead of 3M tape that is more expensive at one store.

What I repeatedly found (after giving Chinese tape chance after chance) is that what I bought from China was junk. Their adhesives weren't very good at room temperature, and at 30° F (well above its minimum rated temperature), the DUCK brand exhibited so little adhesion that I wondered how UL and CSA could have approved it. The DUCK backing seemed brittle and fragile, sometimes fragmenting when I tried to lift up the tape roll's leading edge in 30° weather. Once I successfully removed a piece to wrap around an electrical extension cord, I noticed that it did not conform or seal well. It wasn't just bad, but shockingly bad.

The DUCK label included a warning:

How practical is that? Pity the poor electrician using this junk, potentially every hour of every workday for his or her entire career. Or pity the poor customers with electrical boxes stuffed with wires insulated with this tape. If I washed my hands after touching every piece of toxic junk from China, I'd spend a big chunk of my life doing that, and my skin would be drier than a desert.

I've purchased some DUCK brand tape (not electrical tape) that was reasonable quality, but I'd never buy their electrical tape again, nor would I buy the stuff from Commercial Electric. Why would I? One big-box lumber warehouse charges the same for this as the made-in-America 3M brand that is lead-free and noticeably superior, with better adhesive, better backing, and superior cold-weather performance despite 3M's characteristically understated temperature range.

Case study: Tool Shop^® self-destructing spring clamps

These are some of the junkiest tools ever made. Most of them broke the first time I opened the clamps, using just enough force to do that. I stored the intact clamps in the storage tube and opened it about two years later, finding that all but one clamp had self-destructed. The intact clamp (the small black one on the right) also self-destructed during the few minutes of this photo shoot without being touched.

Did I just get a bad batch? That's very improbable because the different sizes and colors indicate they were not manufactured at the same time or in the same molds.

With 22 clamps and 22 failures, this made-in-China junk batted .000.

Case study: Flimsy, dangerous pizza cutter

This pizza cutter fell apart after a few uses. I was applying firm pressure to cut a pizza because it took firm pressure to cut that (and other) pizza when the handle suddenly fell off, causing my hand to almost hit the pizza wheel. Had that happened, I would have needed surgery. The handle is molded rubber and isn't strong enough to securely hold the pizza wheel—something any child could easily figure out. The question is, why couldn't the engineer who designed this safety nightmare?

Case study: CD player/radio with pathetic sound quality

This Jensen^® CD player repeatedly skips while playing discs without visible defects that play perfectly in various CD players made in Japan. The flaw in this junky product was not a result of it being worn out; it botched disc playback the first time it was used, and every time thereafter. Its AM/FM radio has noticeably worse sound quality than the first 2-transistor radio I made as a teenager just getting started in electronics. Jensen^® once was a brand name that signified quality, but the attention to detail in this product is so poor that its label says “Made in china” instead of “Made in China.”

Case study: Hair dryer that excels in dying, not drying

This made-in-China hair dryer still looks shiny and new after a few months of occasional use by one person, but it emits sounds that signal that it is dying prematurely, as have countless other made-in-China hair dryers I've owned. In contrast, a hair dryer not made in China lasted many years when used by my entire family decades ago when all of the kids had long hair thicker than fur.

I'm not anti-Chinese products; I am anti-junk, no matter where it is produced. I feel no obligation to buy American products if the workers who produced them want an arm and a leg for stuff that doesn't last and gives me gray hair. Competition is ultimately good for consumers, but the Chinese are so incredibly clever that they were able to pull the wool over the eyes of people around the globe, hooking them on McChina stuff with prices so low we couldn't pass them up, but with hidden price tags we cannot afford.

Although brilliant, China needed help in pulling the wool over our eyes. It got it from Wal-Mart and big-box stores like it, which are myopically—even insanely—obsessed with low prices, not product quality and ultimate long-term prices.

Based on what I've heard from multiple sources, Wal-Mart strong-arms its suppliers into selling them products at such low cost that producers usually can afford to have them made in China only. An American manufacturer who wanted to pay his workers good wages and benefits, and give them enough time to make quality products, would often not have a chance with chains like Wal-Mart that prefer to sell McJunk because it is initially cheaper.

More gray hairs for consumers? A greater net cost for them? Ultimately more energy wasted? Who cares? The Walton family that owns Wal-Mart has made much more money than Bill Gates by selling us junk that fills our landfills and helps pollute our environment and destroy our economy. The Walton Family Foundation gives token amounts of money to pull the wool over our eyes in another way: trying to dupe us into thinking they care. However, based on the paltry wages and benefits they pay their employees, the three children of Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton care more about themselves than their 1 - 2 million employees and families who struggle to survive on the breadcrumbs they're given.

Sure, no one is forcing those employees to work like slaves so the Waltons can live better than kings. In theory, the employees could work for other businesses, but the Wal-Mart “price is everything” myopia has infected other businesses (often in a desperate attempt to compete with them) who also pay peanuts. Thus, employees can choose to have a chain wrapped around their ankles by working at Wal-Mart or a clone of it.

We're paying a high price for low prices, and the Waltons are laughing all the way to the bank. They're also laughing at us and our price myopia.

You do know what myopia means, don't you?

It means shortsightedness.

Think about it.

Here is something else to ponder: Would we be better off if the Walton family or the Bosch family dictated how our products were made? The answer is obvious.

Related articles

East meets West, China poisons our products, die, Americans!

The federal government fining Americans who sell or resell contaminated items even if they didn't make them!

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