Ryan Williams
March 21, 2015
Module 9
When you order a product online, you rarely think about what happens when you click the "Confirm Purchase" button. Freidman discusses in this chapter all of the things that can happen. He starts off with telling you what type of computer he has. After this, he tells you of the journey of all the parts from his laptop that came together to form the final product. In order to build a computer you need to have all the parts and obviously you won't make them all yourself. So when he presses "Order", messages are sent to a bunch of different companies. Each company then sends the needed part to an assembly factory where all the pieces come together. That sounds simple right? Well, he tells you where a couple of the components of his laptop came from. His battery coming from an American-owned factory is Malaysia. The wireless card from either an American-owned factory in China or one in Malaysia. That is just a few examples. When you think of the whole assembly, parts from just one laptop can have come from all across the world.
Al-Qaeda has a supply chain. Before you start thinking 'Who in the world would be supplying al-Qaeda?' let me explain. Companies produce millions of products throughout the year. After the produce them, they send the out to distributors to sell them. Once they leave the factory, the company the produced them have no control over who will buy them. This means that anyone, even members of al-Qaeda, could walk in to one of those distributors and buy it. The producers have no control over that and they most likely never will. This would mean that al-Qaeda does have suppliers.
The curse of oil is basically this, When a country finds oil and starts drilling it and selling it, they don't have to worry about using that money to improve their country. What this means is that a country can become rich, but the conditions in that country can still remain poor. Since the money is not coming from taxes, the government does not have to worry about using the money for the people of the country. When this happens, people living in that country can bet very upset with the government because they are not doing anything for the people and this can cause a lot of problems.
I like your opening of essay, I agree with your explain about the curse of oil because oil can bring the positive and negative, and most negative happened for the people if the government don't see it.
ReplyDeleteWe sometimes forget how production occurs, because with all the online shopping and purchasing our minds don't go beyond the "submit order." I was very surprised at how big Dell is and what a large corporation it had. I was very impressed with all the work that goes into one laptop, almost makes it seem unrealistic that all those people could put it all together in what less than a week!
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