Chapter 367 New Life
Chapter 367 New Life
7 month 11 day.
Gao Wen received a reply from the Sydney Climate Research Institute. He looked at the reply in the email with a look of disappointment on his face.
The Sydney Climate Research Institute said he was not suitable, but recommended him to work in Australia's Northern Territory. Gao Wen felt very embarrassed about this result. After all, the Northern Territory was too far away from Sydney. Even though Australia's east coast had planned to build a high-speed railway, he still felt the distance was too far.
"Dear, it's okay." Jenny smiled and comforted, "My work is enough to cover our family's daily expenses for the time being, plus the savings we have accumulated in the past, there won't be any problems in the short term."
"Okay!" Gao Wen was not the kind of person who liked to dwell on trivial matters. He took a bottle of grapefruit juice from the refrigerator.
Jenny's current monthly income is about 1.8 yuan. After all, she is a doctor of law, and the Chinese real estate company she works for pays her relatively well.
This is because Jenny has not been employed for enough years. If she works for another two or three years, even if she does not make any special contributions, she can be promoted to a higher level through her length of service, thereby increasing her income.
Gao Wen's family has five people. Even if only Jenny is working, with the current living consumption level, a monthly income of 1.8 yuan is still enough to get by.
After all, Australia's current education model has gradually been aligned with the Asian Union, and full-cycle compulsory education is generally implemented.
The so-called full-cycle compulsory education means compulsory education from kindergarten, primary school, middle school to university.
Students only need to pay for miscellaneous expenses such as textbooks and uniforms.
Things like textbooks and uniforms for compulsory education are all produced by a dozen suppliers and the prices are fixed.
At the same time, the fees are no longer collected by the school, but are purchased by students at designated compulsory education guarantee centers, leaving no opportunity for the school to manipulate the system behind closed doors.
Everything including textbooks, stationery, school uniforms, shoes, school bags, and student electronic products are purchased at this compulsory education guarantee center. The prices of all products are publicly and transparently available on the official website.
As for how to ensure differentiation of school uniforms, this problem is actually very easy to solve.
The designated clothing factory will design dozens of school uniforms. Once the school selects the styles, they will be announced directly on the official website.
Parents only need to take their children to the Compulsory Education Guarantee Center to measure their body sizes and then complete the order entry. One week later, the school uniforms will be delivered to the students' homes by mail.
In fact, the textile industry in various places is developing well now, mainly due to the application of a large number of AI technologies. Fully automatic AI sewing machines can reduce the cost of customized clothing sharply.
This is also a major trend in the development of the times.
If the traditional manual tailoring model is still used, then with the current minimum monthly wage standard of 4500 yuan in Asia, plus the regulations that work cannot exceed 6 hours a day and there must be no less than 7 days of rest each month, even in Annan and Java where wages are relatively low, the production cost of tailors under the manual model is still too high.
What's more, tailors are often technical workers and their salaries will be higher.
Therefore, in the Asian Union where wage levels have risen across the board, the selling price of each set of handmade custom clothes produced by traditional tailors is no less than one thousand yuan.
In this case, in order to reduce costs and increase efficiency, the introduction of fully automatic sewing machines has become an industry consensus.
After all, the Asian Union must ensure high incomes for all without increasing working hours, and at the same time does not want to deindustrialize. It can only adopt a smarter and more automated production model.
...
"Dear, you take Gina, Anna, and Marcus to the Compulsory Education Guarantee Center tomorrow. They will measure their body sizes, customize school uniforms and shoes, and do a physical examination for admission. I have already made an appointment a few days ago."
"No problem." Gao Wen nodded and took a sip of grapefruit juice.
"Remember to bring your ID."
"Okay, leave it to me." Gao Wen asked again, "How much does it cost to customize the school uniform shoes?"
Jenny stirred her coffee with a spoon while counting the expenses: "Two sets of winter clothes, 300 yuan... three sets of spring and autumn clothes, 300 yuan... two sets of summer clothes, 200 yuan... a pair of winter shoes, a pair of rain boots, a pair of sandals, a pair of sneakers... all together, 1200 yuan."
"one person?"
"Of course it's one person. The three of them together make 3600 yuan."
"It's so cheap, there won't be any problems with the quality, right?"
Jenny smiled and replied, "Don't worry! If you have any problems, just complain directly."
In fact, Gao Wen’s concern is that he is not yet accustomed to the consumption power of the Asian Union.
A set of winter school uniform costs only 150 yuan, which was hard to imagine in the past. It was not only difficult to achieve in Europe, but also in America and the former Serbia.
However, the current Asian Union can be easily achieved.
A set of winter school uniforms suitable for the Sydney area, including thermal pants, thermal inner shirt, cotton vest and down jacket, has a production cost of only about 115 yuan. The clothing company makes 20 yuan, the security center makes 10 yuan, and the logistics company makes 5 yuan. The final retail price is 150 yuan.
The reason why such low costs can be achieved is fundamentally due to the improvement of technology and the great development of productivity.
Garment factories need fabrics, fluff fillings, threads and the like, and because the production costs of source materials have become lower, their overall costs have also dropped significantly.
Take down jackets as an example.
If it was an old down jacket, even if the poorest quality filling was used, it would be difficult for a down jacket to cost 50 yuan.
But things are different now.
The filling materials of school uniform down jackets are no longer traditional duck down or goose down, but plant down.
Plant down is made by inserting goose down-related genes into reed genes through genetic technology, and then through a series of genetic modifications, it becomes down reed. The properties of this reed down at this time are 99% similar to those of natural goose down.
Many indoor farms are growing this stuff. The production of this plant down is simpler than natural goose down, and the production capacity is huge.
The downy reeds in the indoor farm can be harvested four times a year, and each acre can produce about 4 tons of plant down per year.
In 2027, at the end of the golden age, Seres produced about 45 tons of duck down, at about 42 yuan per ton.
By 2030, the Platinum Age, 367 million tons of plant hair were produced in Seris in the first half of the year alone, at a price of 1.7 yuan per ton.
The standard amount of plant down filling for down jackets in Sydney is 200 grams per down jacket, and the cost of the down is about $4.
This is the dimensionality reduction attack brought about by productivity and technology.
For example, maple leaf duck down jackets and the like are almost powerless to fight back against the impact of new technologies.
Clothing companies that use plant wool can easily launch a public opinion offensive against those clothing companies that prefer to use animal wool.
After all, from the perspective of animal protection alone, clothing companies that use animal fur can easily be caught up in public opinion storms.
Therefore, in the past two years, more and more clothing companies have chosen to embrace plant cashmere.
Clothing companies that do not embrace it can only turn to the luxury goods market, but luxury clothing is not easy to make.
What's more, the similarity between plant down and goose down reaches 99%. In terms of warmth retention properties, there is almost no difference between the two. Moreover, the harvesting and processing technology of plant down is relatively simple, which poses an almost fatal threat to duck down and goose down.
The same results were obtained for other fabrics.
For example, traditional open-air cotton is equally powerless when faced with gene-edited cotton, which can produce about 3 tons per mu and 9 tons per year in indoor farms.
For non-food crops like cotton, the advantages of gene-edited varieties are too great, and the risks are not high. Traditional varieties simply cannot compete with gene-edited varieties. In addition, in terms of chemical fibers, although biodegradable chemical fiber fabrics are currently used to reduce plastic pollution, their cost is actually about 60% lower than that of traditional chemical fibers.
Although the service life of degradable chemical fibers is relatively short, under normal use conditions, it can only last for a maximum of two and a half years, but this is also the industry rule jointly promoted by most clothing companies.
After all, if a down jacket can be used for five or six years, the repurchase rate of the clothing will drop by more than 60%.
But if a set of clothes can only be used for one or two years, the consumer's repurchase rate will double.
Against the backdrop of generally falling prices, consumers don’t actually have much to complain about.
For example, if consumers wear a dozen pairs of underwear for 20 yuan a week and then throw them away, they won’t feel bad about it.
The service life of silk clothes and cotton and linen clothes, which are very popular nowadays, is unlikely to exceed one or two years. This is to increase the repurchase rate of consumers.
For students, after they place an order for their school uniforms, the supplier will not send all of them at once, but only the uniforms for the corresponding season.
For example, Gao Wen's three children will start school in September this year, so the supplier will only provide spring and autumn clothes, and then summer clothes when summer approaches.
Australia is rapidly integrating into the Asian Community, and its consumption patterns are also rapidly moving closer to those of the Asian Community.
Gao Wen's family has only been immigrating for more than a month, so they are naturally not used to the consumption patterns here.
Even some Australian locals are not used to the current rapidly changing consumption patterns.
But time will fade everything.
Gao Wen chatted with Jenny for a while, and suddenly saw a text message notification on his phone.
"Huh? How come there's money being transferred into my bank account?"
"What's wrong? What money?" Jenny was confused.
Gao Wen looked at it for a while, then seemed to remember something. He opened another app on his phone and entered its background. Then he suddenly realized: "It turned out to be the payment for the novel."
When Jenny heard this, she also remembered this: "Manuscript fee? Oh, is it the novel you published in that fantasy world before?"
"Yes, it's the fee for the Fantasy World."
"how much is it?"
"1.7 yuan."
"So many?" Jenny's eyes widened.
"Is it a lot?" Gao Wen scratched his head. In the several author groups he joined, the authors generally earned tens of thousands of yuan every month.
In fact, this is also a dividend of the times.
You should know that the current Asian Commonwealth, together with the Oceania region, has a total population of 24.8 billion, and the general income of these people is relatively high.
Even the Fantasy World platform, which has a small audience, has 1.7 million registered users. The traffic and payments brought by so many users amount to a considerable flow of funds.
In addition, there is now strict copyright protection and very severe crackdown on piracy.
Multiple factors contribute to the high returns of current literary works.
For example, Gao Wen's "Year Without Summer", even though it was only serialized for 5 words in one month and the content was relatively ordinary, the scale of its browsing and subscription was not small.
Many top authors can even earn hundreds of millions from a single work.
Therefore, Gao Wencai did not think that the 1.7 yuan in royalties was anything but a big deal.
In fact, he didn't know that if his work was released in the golden age, it would probably be a flop, and he would be lucky to get a few hundred yuan in royalties a month.
Gao Wen came at a good time.
Looking at the payment, he suddenly became interested: "Honey, why don't we go traveling this month? Do you have any vacation time?"
"Holiday?" Jenny took out her phone and checked her work schedule to see if she could make any adjustments.
She only had two days off this month, and had six days off, and then she tried to make adjustments in her schedule.
This kind of scheduling software can use AI to automatically analyze and reasonably adjust the working hours of employees throughout the company.
Therefore, if she wanted to adjust her shifts to make up for consecutive holidays, she needed to try this software. After trying for five or six minutes, she finally managed to get five consecutive days of vacation between the 22nd and 26th of this month.
Click to apply for leave directly.
In less than three minutes, the system automatically approved her application for leave.
This is also the management model commonly adopted by many companies today. Holiday adjustments and leave, which previously required approval from department heads, can now be automatically applied for and approved through the system without going through department managers.
Unless a vacation of more than half a month is requested for no reason, the system will not remind the company's department head.
Especially things like maternity leave, bereavement leave, marriage leave, etc., even long holidays can be applied for at will.
Once an employee becomes pregnant, as long as she provides the system with a medical report of the pregnancy, the system will automatically approve 10 to 15 months of paid leave. Her husband can also apply for paternity leave, usually 3 to 5 months.
Precisely because vacations are easy to apply for, the tourism industry in the Asian Union is becoming increasingly hot.
For popular scenic spots that require reservations, tickets can only be grabbed a few months in advance.
"I have applied for vacation from the 22nd to the 26th of this month, a total of 5 days."
Gawain struck while the iron was hot and asked, “Jenny, is there anywhere you want to go?”
"Where do you want to go?" Jenny was also a little entangled. She thought for a while and suddenly thought of a place: "Oh, right, didn't Anna say she wanted to go to the Great Barrier Reef a few days ago? Let's go to the Great Barrier Reef?"
"Great Barrier Reef?" Gao Wen checked the travel service website on his phone.
Open scenic spots related to the Great Barrier Reef.
The nearly 2,000-kilometer coastline from Sandy Cape to Cape York belongs to the Great Barrier Reef coast. Every coastal city along this coastline can receive tourists.
However, the more popular coastal cities in the Great Barrier Reef scenic area no longer have entry tickets this month.
After much deliberation, he could only choose a relatively small city nearby: "I chose Yeppoon."
"Where..." Jenny looked at the introduction on the travel website and said, "It's OK. After all, there will definitely be no tickets for popular scenic spots this month."
This is also a trouble brought about by the scenic spot reservation system, but the benefits of this system are also obvious.
On the one hand, it prevents tourists from crowding into popular scenic spots.
On the other hand, it also brings new passenger flow to those remote emerging tourist cities.
(End of this chapter)