Comments by "Keit Hammleter" (@keithammleter3824) on "China & The 2022 CT Scan Shortage" video.

Just In Time was important to Japan due to their shortage of land causing extreme real-estate prices. Literally they could not afford on-site storage. This problem has never existed in western countries. However, in the1980's Japan's economic success led to fad adoption of Japanese methods in the West - Just In Time supply with all the rest, such as the Taguchi Method, Total Quality Method, etc. I remember attending in courses on Japanese methods (forced to attend by my employer) and seriously annoying the teacher by pointing out that these methods were American methods taught to the Japanese during the US occupation when WW2 ended. and that industry in the west had since moved on. And also annoying the teacher by pointing out that Japanese success was not due to using smart business methods, it was due to Japan not spending much on defense, and business collusion that would be regarded as anti-competitive and even illegal in the West. The current problems stem not from penny-pinching as such, it stems because cost per unit falls with increasing size of the automated production. My wife used to work for a large multi-national electronics company. In the 1960's they had factories in nearly every western country, using lots and lots of low skill labour. She went on a factory tour - this one factory was still making cell phones - entirely automatically using robots - for the world market. She asked how much of the production was for our country - she was told "about a week's production'"
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