For it to be more economical to build a bridge over in China, stick it on a boat, and then drop it in place 1000 miles from where it was originally made is telling of where the construction industry is headed.
A few years ago, I was working doing some of the engineering for a major alumina refinery upgrade in Australia. One of the major parts of an alumina refinery is what's called a calciner, which heats the produced alumina to drive off the chemically-bound water from the product. They're complex piece of plant with large ducts, blowers and cyclones all laid out with insulating material to protect against the high temperatures and erosive nature of the alumina.
We built our calciners in Thailand as entire modules - not merely the size of a bridge, but the size of a 6-story building, complete with all equipment, structure and wiring in place, and then shipped them to the refinery site in Australia. The largest of the modules was 1800+ tons.
Ah, found a picture: Here's one of our calciners about to be offloaded from the MV Sea Baron. The crawler crane at the very right of the picture gives a sense of scale.
In Portland, ME, where I grew up there used to be this huge blue drydock in the harbor. Occasionally I would see whole Burke class destroyers[1] lifted up out of the water in it. The end of the Cold War meant that the navy was downsizing, though, and eventually it was decided that there were better uses for the place. It was sold to a city in Croatia, and they somehow put floats underneath and just sailed the whole thing across the Atlantic. Then they built a few oil rigs where it used to be, and sailed those down to Venezuela.
The opposite happens, too. I heard a story of how Chinese buyers bought an old, unused steel mill - think it was in the UK - and shipped it wholesale to China. The technology used in that mill would still be profitable in the Chinese environment, even though it had been superseded in the UK.
All this shipping of buildings back and forth...this clearly needs disruption!
As someone who lives in Berlin I appreciate this reference, but is the point of this comment "speak up before all programming is done by smart thirdworlders"?
That really wasn't my point, but I didn't do a good job of developing it. In a nutshell: if nothing is done to stem the tide of entire industries being shipped from North America to China one has to wonder how long it will be before there's no economy to speak of. Yes, yes, I'm aware economics pundits would have us all believe that the glorious shift to an "information economy" is the grand way forward and anything that smacks of isolationism is to be roundly rejected (for reasons that are entirely mysterious to me), however the unemployment numbers in the US and the decline of real wages over the last 30 years suggests something else altogether.
Generally speaking, industries get shipped off to China because people in China are poorer, and will work for less money. When there are as many industries in China as in the US, they won't be poorer any more, and the flow will stop.
However, our current spate of unemployment isn't due to China - otherwise things wouldn't have suddenly gone to hell in '08 but would have gotten slowly worse as China industrialized. The decline in real wages in the US might be due to competition for natural resources from China and India and Africa and South America, but generally I'm not going to complain about things going well in countries much poorer than my own.
"Generally speaking, industries get shipped off to China because people in China are poorer, and will work for less money. When there are as many industries in China as in the US, they won't be poorer any more, and the flow will stop."
Net result: global average wages settle somewhere near what a Pakistani brickmaker would call "prosperity". What you're describing isn't a win.
And as far as putting it on a boat, sailing it across the pacific, through panama, and up the atlantic - or dropping it off in Long Beach, Oakland, Seattle, or Mexico and putting it on a train... well you do the math :)
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/8602786...
For it to be more economical to build a bridge over in China, stick it on a boat, and then drop it in place 1000 miles from where it was originally made is telling of where the construction industry is headed.