
Deep in Brazil’s Amazon, Exploring the Ruins of Ford’s Fantasyland - pgodzin
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/20/world/americas/deep-in-brazils-amazon-exploring-the-ruins-of-fords-fantasyland.html
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neonscribe
Company towns were commonplace, especially near mines in the US in the late
19th-early 20th century. Workers were paid in company scrip that could only be
spent at the company store.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town)

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maxerickson
Michigan Tech uses a former Ford company town as a field camp.

[http://www.mtu.edu/forest/fordcenter/](http://www.mtu.edu/forest/fordcenter/)

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tn13
> Ford might have avoided such tragedies, and the ruinous management of the
> plantation, if he had sought counsel from specialists in caring for rubber
> trees or scholars of the Amazon’s capacity to thwart grandiose ventures. But
> he seemed to abhor learning from the past.

If Ford had sort counsel from experts he would have perhaps been a clerk
somewhere. After the fact analysis.

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chris_wot
He went bankrupt twice. Perhaps he could have done a bit more listening.

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bane
There's an interesting discussion buried here for business and the connection
to the "not invented here syndrome". It seems to be a very careful balancing
act to decide where to draw the boundary lines of your business vs. sourcing
needed items externally.

For example, many people are surprised to find out how little of a car is
actually built from scratch by an automobile manufacturer. e.g. the chairs you
sit in while driving around are probably built and supplied by an entirely
different company you've never heard of! The head unit, but another, the
brakes another and so on. How much of a Ford is actually "Ford"?

Car manufacturers seem to have figured this out pretty well over decades and
decades, but then we're very inclined to also see the benefits of tight
vertical integration. After all, if you buy your rubber from a rubber
supplier, aren't you de facto already paying for their company town overhead
expenses, transportation, processing and a little profit on top? If you do it
yourself, you can eliminate the profit payout, and maybe even optimize some of
the production overhead even more!

Apple is a great example, screens, memory, disks, GPUs, batteries and CPUs are
all sourced from elsewhere. Apple basically just designs the package and does
final assembly of the components. Yet recently Apple has started to get into
CPU design. Why?

I think the analysis of this decision would be fascinating to see.

For most of us, in software, we have similar decisions to make with respect to
using external libraries, buying services from external vendors and so on. Why
buy compute resources from Amazon when you can just build what you need
cheaper? Heck, why stop there, why isn't your company writing their own
operating system or their own Hard Drives?

There's lots of companies that make the wrong decision early on and end up
buried one way or the other later on and it takes heroics to unbury from that
decision if at all.

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mannykannot
I have seen it said of the DC10 that McDonnell Douglas ended up outsourcing
all the profit while retaining the risk.

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brianbreslin
Fascinating. Are there other examples of industrialists from that era building
their own towns? I know I have heard of some, but none come to mind right now.

~~~
tobych
Boulder City, Nevada, was built as a semi-permanent town in 1931 to house
5,000 working on the Hoover Dam.

The Wikipedia entry says the city "was exceptionally rare as an example of a
town fully planned under government supervision. This is unlike 19th century
privately funded company town examples found in the United Kingdom, such as
Port Sunlight, or in the United States, such as Pullman, Chicago."

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boulder_City,_Nevada](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boulder_City,_Nevada)

The thing that fascinates me about company and government towns is the rules
the residents ended up having to follow. In Boulder City, no drinking,
prostitution or gambling. In Saltaire, UK, no hanging washing on a line, or
"Gatherings or loitering of more than eight persons in the streets".

[http://www.saltairevillageexperience.co.uk/rules-for-
living-...](http://www.saltairevillageexperience.co.uk/rules-for-living-in-
saltaire-village-1853-1876/)

~~~
vogt
Boulder City has retained status as an anti-gaming community despite being not
much other than a quiet retiree town these days, and work on the Hoover Dam
being complete for a long time now.

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RileyJames
"History is bunk. What difference does it make how many times the ancient
Greeks flew their kites?" Henry ford.

I know little of Greek history, what is he referrencing regarding flying
kites?

~~~
shakna
Maybe Archytas of Tarentum?

A mathematician (~425BC) who experimented with kites and other lightweight
designs for flight. One particularly interesting story suggests he made a
wooden dove powered by... Well, we'd suggest it might be compressed air or
something of the like.

I'd guess Ford is saying the experiments don't matter, because they didn't
take the experiment and make it useful, like those kites made by Mozi and Lu
Ban, which were used as early warning systems and similar tasks.

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lobster_johnson
Obligatory reference to Jóhann Jóhannsson's superb album "Fordlândia",
inspired by the real-life place.

[https://youtu.be/og9QtUJZ8iI](https://youtu.be/og9QtUJZ8iI)

[https://open.spotify.com/album/2I4uGgkMgN3UGE8ZQjCMjB](https://open.spotify.com/album/2I4uGgkMgN3UGE8ZQjCMjB)

~~~
dopamean
The album is mentioned in the article.

