Wasn't I just saying this?

From the thecarlounge.net, which is a great little news source - snarky and fun, and loaded with up to the minute information.

Brian's friend Wes is the author - he's awesome. In fact, I want all of you to go and start reading thecarlounge.net so that he keeps publishing it. I'll wait.

The 1970 booklet from China entitled China Tames Her Rivers is full of eye-poppingly extreme Communist propaganda, but every word of it was meant seriously, including these: "There were early attempts by traitors to hoodwink the people with such decadent Western notions as "put technique first" and "place specialists in charge of engineering." These traitors were swiftly dealt with."

Mao had a deep-seated loathing for engineers and other intellectuals, and so did everything he could to minimise their contribution to Chinese society. In the so-called Great Leap Forward, intellectuals were rounded up and shot, and Mao (who didn't know a thing about metallurgy) ordered farmers to quit farming and instead build small coal smelters on their land, melt down their farming implements and turn them into raw steel. He thought this would act as a springboard for China to have a sudden industrial revolution. What actually happened was a sudden lack of food because nobody was farming, a sudden lack of farm implements because they'd all been melted down, and a sudden glut of utterly useless metal goo that couldn't even remotely be called steel. Vast numbers of people starved to death.

So, culturally, China not only has no history of valuing Western "quality" and design as we know them, but they actually have a strong history of violently devaluing them. They will emerge from this, but it's going to take a very long time. Unfortunately, Western MBAs don't want to wait, and the collateral damage includes mislabeled glycol being sold as glycerin, melamine being stuffed into dog food, and this: The Detroit News is reporting that federal safety officials have ordered over 450,000 tires made by Hangzhou Zhongce Rubber Co. recalled because corner-cutting during assembly can lead to complete and catastrophic tread separation. The tires were sold for light trucks under the brand names Westlake, Compass, Telluride and YKS in a variety of 15 and 16-inch sizes. The recall affects all tires sold because the manufacturer "failed to provide information that would allow [the US distributor] to determine exactly how many tires, and which batches, have the problem."

Here's the news article from the Detroit News. The website (thecarlounge.net, remember?) has a cool picture of what this tread/corner separation looks like.