Slashdot Mirror
Inside Factory China
blackbearnh writes "While China is attempting to pull its industry up out of mere manufacturing mode, for now the country is the production workhorse of the consumer electronics industry. Almost anything you pick up at a Best Buy first breathed life across the Pacific Ocean. But what is it like to shepherd a product through the design and production process? Andrew 'bunnie' Huang has done just that with the Chumby, a new Internet appliance. In an interview with O'Reilly Radar, he talks about the logistical and moral issues involved with manufacturing in China, as well as his take on the consumer's right to hack the hardware they purchase."
I met this guy at a Foo camp party in Beijing, and he gave a presentation on how he reverse engineers Nintendo Wiis. He uses some kind of custom chassis that connects to both sides of the Wii's motherboard and burns off the tops of chips to look at their structure through a microscope. Pretty impressive...
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
He has it wrong. Unlocked communication devices are different, because they can cause additional costs/damage on the network they are connected to. This is the reason smartphone makers cripple their devices.
If the cell phone network eventually becomes as robust *cough* as the Internet, then the need for unlocked devices will go away. But right now, there is a lot of "trust the client" built in to the way the cellular network operates.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Like the ones he just kind of hand-waves, by repeating 'Oh! It's so much better in the factories than it is outside, you know? And they've tried to fool me by bringing in good food on the days I'm there, you know. And the workers aren't going to tell me how shitty it really might be, because I don't really speak the language and they really don't want to lose their jobs... or get in shit with the mob like this rebuttal suggests might happen. You know.'
Gem from the article: "...it's a little bit different in terms of its industrial design. It has a soft leather case and has electronics on the inside. So trying to explain something that the Chinese guys hadn't seen before..." where was teddy ruxpin manufactured again? (I don't honestly know, but it's still a hilarious sentence.)
Now what is interesting about this guy (which applies to manufacturing jobs anywhere) is that he goes and sleeps in the dorm and eats the food. And he even talks about how sometimes they will try to fool him, et cetera. So what he's talking about is personal responsibility for corporate actions. It's not forced on you, although sometimes in China they will execute you for fraud if it's politically expedient...
Here's a painful bit from the article:
I would add that I can't walk through the toy section any more because the smell of offgassing plastic makes me want to puke. I'm not one of the super-sensitive types, or at least I'm not sensitive to everything. And I like toys, I'm not ashamed to admit that I still have a collection of 'em sprinkled around here and there collecting dust. When I start to reenact scenes from Spaceball with them, I'll start accepting snarky comments. Crap, I'll make a webapp for the purpose. I even just got a new LCD TV that my lady chased out of the living room until it stops stinking so badly. I don't think that has to do with inherent disgustingness of electronics so much as Sharp's failure to actually wash them after production to remove residues. I pick on them because I'm staring at their logo under my windows taskbar, but I've been noticing more and more of this as time has gone by, both from name-brands and crap-brands. (As in, when you get one as a present, you say crap. e.g. "Oh crap, it's a Coby." Maybe not out loud, depending on how polite you are.)
Finally, NERD FACTOR NINE:
Seriously, if you don't have a story like this about your nickname, are you really a geek? Definitely +10 geek cred points on that paragraph. Now if they can just lose the ballbag picture frame, maybe they'll have something.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
What China will keep is the ability to disallow full foreign ownership of its companies. The neocons want China to open up so that they can buy up all the companies and funnel the money out of the country. So far the leadership has not allowed that to happen and based on history (Opium Wars) they will not allow that to happen again.
We tend to forget about such things here on slashdot, but actual publications have people called editors whose job it is to fix things like that. They omit all the redundant bullshit and provide you with something intended for people to read. Even in conversation such things are annoying, but not completely useless as only a small percentage of communication is actually verbal. Let's say that 50% of it was verbal, that would still give you an opportunity to hang an awful lot of meaning on those two words (how much mileage can you get out of two words in the English language? examine a short fiction contest to find out) in a conversation through posture, inflection, facial expression, and all the other cues that we have access to in such a situation. None of them apply here, so what we need here is some editing. The best thing about the internet is that anyone can share their opinion. The worst thing about the internet is that anyone can share their opinion.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
There has been a shift in corporate thinking over the last 20 years. They have slowly been moving from selling products, to licensing products. Companies worldwide have taken their cue from the software industry.
DRM laden musics. Not for rental DVDs and videos. EULAs on video games. Proprietary printer cartridges. Cars that can only be fixed at licensed dealers. Homeowners associations. The list goes on.
The sad reality is that many companies now think, or behave as if they do think, that once you buy their product they still have control and veto power over how, when, when and who can use it. This has been a huge shift in western industry, thirty years in the making. Its genesis can essentially be traced back to this letter. Once the idea of selling numbers to people, and retaining indefinite control over their use of that number, became firmly entrenched in the law, culture and mindset of our industry, it was much smaller step to apply that same principle to books, cars, nintendos and houses.
I'm not sure where this will end, but I can guarantee you one thing. The myriad of artificial restrictions being placed on property in the western world are most certainly not being applied or enforced in developing countries.
May the Maths Be with you!
Have you ever seen WalMart: High Cost or another movie about Chinese factories? They would never be able to afford anything they make. They make nothing, and I say that almost literally. Half of what they make gets taken out of their pay for room and board at the factory. Whether they live in them or not. You can't negotiate work time. You have 12 hour days without breaks. The factories make US prisons look like they're a five star hotel. Not to mention the fact that they constantly recruit children in them. If you talk back not only will you get fired, you may also get killed with no repercussion to the company.
Has the old saint in his forest not yet heard of it? That God is dead?
I would say "you are fucked" because you (or rather, the U.S. government) depends on not only a) entities buying your treasury securities now, but also b) entities buying your treasury in the future. The first wave of baby boomers will be eligible for social security and medicare benefits in the next 16 to 24 months, there is no way in hell the U.S. will be able to fund these obligations in the state the U.S. economy is currently in. This means they'll have to borrow more money in the future.
If the U.S. behaves like they're still top dog and enact policies that devalues all the money they owe to everybody else in the world, guess what, nobody's going to be in line to buy those treasuries when the U.S. needs to sell them the most.
They'd be fucked even more because the U.S. simply has no manufacturing industry. Nobody in the U.S. would even be able to buy a single computer, television set, fax machine, cellphone, or even dog food because companies need to borrow money to buy from suppliers overseas. With savings rates in negative territory, there is no way in hell anybody would lend the U.S. any money whatsoever if they adopt this "it's my currency and I'll inflate it if I want to... you'll get screwed but not me" attitude.
Right now, the U.S. has to convince the world to buy $800B of U.S. government debt. They can't even do *that*, which is why they're selling 30-year bonds to the Fed, because the Fed is the only entity willing to buy them. This action by the Fed *will* inflate the USD, because they simply create the money out of thin air. If China doesn't want to be made an ass by the people who owe them billions, they simply have to sell. The U.S. government will then have to convince the world to buy... not $800B of government debt... but $1.5 trillion. This action alone will *flood* the market with USD and push it down to unbelievable levels. Sure, the value of government debt will decrease because of the massive inflation, but *everything* in America will increase in price.
Why? Because America doesn't make anything anymore. Everything needs to be imported, and importing means paying foreign suppliers in their own currency. So good luck convincing foreign suppliers to accept worthless USD as payment. Commodity prices will go through the roof because they're all price in USD and consumed everywhere else in the world.
In summary, decreasing the purchasing power of the USD is *not* the solution to any of the U.S.'s current problems. Pissing off the largest debtor by inflating the currency may save you a couple hundred billion at first, but you'll pay it all back later (and then some) when you're forced import everything you need... at now-higher prices.
And it's not just China. Do you think if a massive sell-off starts, central banks and investment institutions around the world will sit idly by and wait to be the last one holding depreciating bonds that nobody wants? No way. If you thought the price of oil dropped quickly, it'll be nothing compared to how quick and how far the USD will fall once the selling starts and traders begin short-selling treasuries and USD.
I don't believe for a second that you're stupid, because you fully understand all the immediate implications.
You just need to think ahead a couple steps more.