Some people jack off to passing trains. Chuckie, Last of the Rhodesians, jacks off to factories. Maybe it's because where he comes from, no one knows how to make jack shit.

What a neat piece. It's a good profile of a part of the Seattle economy that I think most people probably never think about.

The mention of floating flour in the last paragraph really made me cringe, though. Dust explosions are bad business.

@1, goddamn, dude. You racists will really just take any possible opportunity to fling shit-stupid hatebombs, won't you?

@1

That's really the best you could come up with? Boring. Utterly mean-spirited and even worse, totally without a bit of wittiness.

Open wide, your throat is about to get scrote-ravaged.

So many Charles haters... (or maybe just a vocal few). But you can always tell within the first half paragraph that he's by-far the best writer The Stranger has. Even if you're no fan of the man, have a little respect for his style at least.

Good job Chuck. It's like I was there.

Loved it! Please visit more factories in the near future!

@3.
Way to stay on topic. +3 more points for rambling near-incoherence.

Hey Charles join the precariat and work temp. You will gain access to all the factories and job sites your little heart desires.

Germany has a great and vibrant economy built on small to medium-size manufacturing businesses, and I've always been really proud of how Seattle fares in that department. Driving through South Seattle and seeing the city rise out of the steel mills, railroads, container ports and warehouses helped inspire me to become an engineer. It's too bad that you never got out to the Kenworth factory, I suppose I'll just have to do that myself. My parents live in Kenmore, which still has some industrial development by the Sammamish River.

Here in Atlanta, where I live now, the economy is post-industrial: nothing but banking, consulting and coding. The results are an economy that sees both monstrous sprawl and overbuilding in good times and massive unemployment and destruction in bad, often leaving whole square miles of the city dilapidated for years. It also sees a minimum-wage underclass that knows what it is and often resorts to crime.

In addition, everything is the same here, every neighborhood is either an identical cookie cutter development of modernist buildings or a broken-glass and torn out copper wiring ghetto of vacant lots. Post-industrial is post-producing things that matter to people and post-working-class. It's also very limiting. There's nothing about an industrial city that prevents the development of banks, developers, consulting firms et cetera, in fact it gives them customers to serve, but a post-industrial city cannot have a manufacturing base.

This piece reminds me of how interesting my job was when I worked for WISHA as an industrial hygienist getting inside hundreds of manufacturing plants. This was a good piece reminding us of manufacturing. We need more manufacturing jobs. The making of things is interesting and creative.

I'm curious about this sentence:

"It is as if by some trick of magic, a factory in Shanghai had become visible."

Is it about the (Asian) people working there? Or about the product they're making (fortune cookies)? The latter is an American invention, and I don't think they are even produced in China, much less consumed there.

@13: They used to be. They were invented in Los Angeles, and the business nearly went bankrupt, so they took them overseas to China at the turn of the 20th Century and they became a hit there. With the rise of Communism, however, such Western decadences were outlawed, though they remained popular among the Chinese communities of Malaysia and Thailand. So yes, actually, at the time many of the families who started those Chinese restaurants came to the US, they were commonly consumed in China.

@12: The only thing holding back WA's manufacturing is Growth Management rules: http://apps.leg.wa.gov/rcw/default.aspx?…

@14 Best as I know, fortune cookies are not, nor have they ever been, commonly consumed in China. They were briefly imported as "American cookies" but they were rejected. They are also not commonly consumed in Malaysian Chinese restaurants -- I've worked there for years. And to the best of my knowledge, nor are they in Thailand. Doesn't mean you won't find them in either place, but they are certainly not popular.

If they were actually manufactured in China at the turn of the century -- doubtful, as they'd be prohibitively expensive to import to the US at that point, the only place consuming them -- it is strange that a contemporary scene in Seattle would remind the author of a turn of the century scene in Shanghai.

@15: "They were briefly imported as "American cookies" but they were rejected."

Sounds like Maoist propaganda to me. Keep in mind that fortune cookies were a complete commercial failure in the US, so if you decide to claim this Maoist propaganda is correct, you will need to explain how they managed to survive decades.

@16 Thank you. You really do have no idea what you are talking about.

I can tell you when I lived in China, I never once saw fortune cookies at any restaurant, nor in the grocery stores. Orange slices are much more common at the end of a meal. Sweets of any kind are exceedingly rare, and are often purchased at a bakery only.

Jeremy, try reading the wiki article. It's not the be-all-and-end-all authority, but like any crowd-sourced project, works pretty damn well.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortune_coo…

I can tell you when I lived in China, I never once saw fortune cookies at any restaurant, nor in the grocery stores. Orange slices are much more common at the end of a meal. Sweets of any kind are exceedingly rare, and are often purchased at a bakery only.

Jeremy, try reading the wiki article. It's not the be-all-and-end-all authority, but like any crowd-sourced project, works pretty damn well.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortune_coo…

@All: LOL! First time I see an actual conversation on the Stranger it's over a stupid tirade involving Chinese fortune cookies. Isn't that revealing. Have a good day you silly oafs, and yes you have been had by a master troll.

You lost me at ant and soft body.

There are some famous restaurants in China where fortune cookies are very famous and easily available.
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