I like snow a lot; it turns the world into a fairytale place. Of course, when you get stuck in the middle of a blizzard with your car or when you have to walk back home because public transportation is not working, it is no fun at all. But every time snow falls it makes me happy. The surprise when snow falls during the night and you wake up in the morning and know something is going on. You lie in your bed and listen. Nothing strange, no sounds… I always jump out of my bed then to check if the world is covered by this beautiful white blanket. The sounds are smothered; there is almost no traffic. This is another advantage of snow in places like Istanbul or Ankara. Of course, before you realize it traffic returns again, but generally the first day you have the world to yourself as a pedestrian. And everything looks so different, so magical.
During a trip to Seben I suddenly got caught by a view that really blew my mind, or should I say, I thought was mind-blowing. For hours I had been on the road; it was cold, and the weather was nice. After I left the highway near Bolu, the landscape slowly changed from very green to greenish-white and near Seben the hills finally were white, snow-white. It was amazing. Wherever I looked I saw pictures. It was about a half-hour drive from Seben. After I conquered a very difficult hill full of curves and sometimes quite steep slopes, suddenly in front of my eyes I saw several huts. This was absolutely mind-blowing. I parked the car, took my camera and left the car. It was a yayla (plateau) and the local people use these huts during summertime because up in the mountains the weather is more enjoyable than down in the city.
A small village stretched out in front of my eyes, and I was amazed by the size of the houses. Generally houses on the plateau are smaller, but here I saw villa-like wooden houses. Although the buildings were not the typical picturesque old Turkish farmhouses, they still had a strong character and in this winter landscape setting it was absolutely stunning. It was about 4 p.m.; the sky started to reflect the rich pastel winter colors in the clouds. It was cold, quite cold, but I did not feel the freezing temperatures because everything together was so perfect. Wherever I aimed my camera I saw the most beautiful pictures. This is why I like winter so much. It shows the world in a completely different mood, temporary natural impressionistic art. At this time of the day, every minute the painting in front of your eyes changes. Here I feel lucky. Lucky to see this and lucky to be a photographer. How on earth would a painter be able to capture all those minutes, those seconds. Pushing the shutter button I can freeze every second; unfortunate painters work hours to capture one moment of this beautiful light.
When I walked toward the houses I suddenly saw a violet color coming through the snow. When I looked I saw nature was still active, something I did not expect, not now. It was a little flower that managed to grow and stick its beautiful little blossom out above the snow. The little warmth the sun was giving us at that moment was enough for this fragile little flower to grow and to collect the warmth of the sun in order to melt the snow surrounding its thin little stem.
The huts looked like shanty houses. All of them were made of wood and many of them had metal-plated roofs. It was as if this was a giant patchwork. As if a sculptor had made a kind of impressionistic version of how he sees houses. One did not resemble another and some of them had holes on the walls that were fixed with a different piece of wood. These houses were definitely made to live in during summertime and were quietly waiting for spring to come. Some of them would not survive the winter. The load of snow on their roof would be too much for the houses, but I do not think this would be a big deal for the people living there during the summertime. They simply would get another piece of wood, take another piece of metal to attach it to the house and in this way make it livable for another year.
Facing the cold weather in Turkey at the moment this story came to my mind. I know it is not always nice to get stuck in the snow, but it also gives us some beautiful moments that we should enjoy and be grateful for. I hope you will like the coming days as much as I do, and so what if you are late for an appointment because of the weather. Just look around and become like a child who during wintertime is always excited about the snow and the difference it makes in our normal lives. Enjoy it because before you know it you will be cursing the hot summer sun again.
As we all know, over the past 30 years, vast portions of the world’s manufacturing base has moved to Asia, primarily China. What you find there is a spiderweb network of small factories supplying parts to each other forming a distribution chain of goods. Those goods are all being delivered by tens of thousands of these little blue diesel trucks, each belching out heavy particulates, CO2 and any number of unhealthy substances. None of the factories are located in any rational proximity to each other; it’s fairly random. The surface streets they travel are generally choked with traffic. Then, each of those factories is running on the Chinese grid, fueled by a lot of dirty coal. Most factories also keep back up diesel generators running, since the Chinese grid is often unreliable. I’ve even seen small, clearly unregulated, coal-fired generators tucked away back in various coves and backstreets putting out very heavy smoke.
Then, of course, all the finished goods are trucked to port, loaded onto an unending train of container ships crossing the Pacific and heading out to all corners of the world. Each of those is burning bunker fuel, which is something akin to asphalt. And on top of that you have designers, engineers and execs flying back and forth to Asia numerous times each year to manage their projects. I have one friend who does 8 to 10 trips a year to China as a product designer, and that’s pretty normal.
Some 70 years ago a man named Taiichi Ohno pioneered Toyota’s incessant quest to ferret out waste from their production systems. His work heralded in a new wave of manufacturing efficiency. You may perhaps remember how the Japanese were crushing the U.S. auto industry in the 1970s and 80s. This was primarily due to systems developed by Ohno.
Taiichi Ohno identified what he termed the “seven forms of waste” or “muda,” as it’s referred to in Japanese. One of the primary forms of muda is “transportation waste.” Moving product was always to be kept at its barest minimum since it adds no value to the end product. There are reams of research on this, and yet, over the past 30 years, transportation waste has exploded to epic proportions. None of it adding value. All of it putting vast quantities of CO2 into the atmosphere.
Not even thinking of CO2, and only being focused on efficiency, what Toyota did to minimize this was to work in Keiretsu’s. They were “families” of suppliers who maintained their facilities in near proximity to the main Toyota assembly plants and they operated their supply chain on hourly delivery schedules. Over half a century ago Toyota and Taiichi Ohno showed us that operations should always be located as close together as possible. This got lost in the mad rush to move production to China.
My background is in manufacturing, with 23 years experience in both domestic and off-shore production across a wide range of products. I am launching a new product on the Kickstarter website to set up a domestic factory in the SF bay area producing a simple consumer electronics product; a set of bluetooth earbuds.
Though initially I’ll be just looking to set to do final assembly, the long term plan with this business is to create a vertically integrated process where, in house, we run a large portion of the creation of the product. We will look to bring in printed circuit board assembly, injection molding for the outer case and earbud parts, and the extrusion process for creating the earbud cords. We will eventually even bring in the printing processes for creating the product packaging. All this so that no process is anything more than a few yards from the next step in assembly. Then the cherry on top will be to have a solar PV installation powering the whole thing.
In this, we would eliminate huge inefficiencies and remove nearly all the middle supply chain CO2 emissions related to the product by removing nearly all the transportation waste, and at the same time creating a more profitable domestic manufacturing business.
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