Slashdot Mirror
Foxconn Invests $210 Million To Build New Production Line For Apple
redletterdave writes "On Monday, Foxconn agreed to invest $210 million to help Apple build out a new production line for 'unspecified components.' The 40,000-square-meter plant plans to hire roughly 35,800 new employees to help assemble parts for either desktop and laptop computers, iPhones, iPads, iPods, or possibly even new products or devices. Apple projects the plant's annual output between $949 million to $1.1 billion, and also estimates the import and export value at roughly $55.8 million."
Don't you get it? The new product will be the technological equivalent of Soylent Green ... a "Soylent brushed metal and glass".
In some places people are cheaper than robots.
I'm gonna go out on a limb and suggest that ALL the employees will not be present at the SAME TIME.
I would assume the employees are working in multiple shifts, in other words, not all 35,800 are in the building at the same time.
Huh? Huai'an city is not in Hainan. It's in Jiangsu province, about 100km west of Shanghai. Hainan is an island off the southern coast of China, near Vietnam.
The China Daily article says there are two separate projects. Foxconn is both building this plant in Huai'an and starting up a new manufacturing base down in Hainan. The Hainan facility is not necessarily Apple-oriented.
I'm sure they know what they're doing. But I do find it interesting that this foxconn plant will employ ten times as many people as all of facebook.com (with 3500 employees). The idea that there could ever be enough "knowledge worker" jobs to replace what manufacturing used to be just doesn't hold up.
If you watched the Foxconn video (or seen any industrial production video), you'd see that for certain types of assembly it's cheaper and easier to get people to do it than to mechanize.
Mechanization requires lots of tooling and is relatively hard to change once built. It's easier to just hire a lot of people and change their procedures when needed.
There's no secret to mass assembly - it's just a serious logistical challenge. Everything needs to be specified, exactly.
There's also some loss of information in TFA. The submitter changed "a plant that covers 40,000 square meters" to "a 40,000 square meters plant". Quite possible there will be more than one floor. A plant with five floors covering 40,000 square meters would be a 200,000 square meter plant.
Too bad that one of America's top companies outsources most of its production
Well ... there is one very simple way of stop companies from outsourcing anything - work in America while accepting Chinese wages
Are you willing to work in America while receiving wages equal to what the Chinese workers are receiving?
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
I don't own one single Apple product
And some decide to stay in the gutter. That is your choice, but don't pretend you are better than me because of it.
Why do you think he is pretending he is better than you? The rest of the quote you conveniently left out is
because I don't buy into walled gardens, it's that simple.
It sounds to me like the closed ecosystem doesn't appeal to him. Saying that "some decide to stay in the gutter" sounds like you are pretending that you are better because you purchased a particular brand.
Whatever the conditions in a Mexican factory might be, the workers are there by choice. Communism is dead in that country, and folks there aren't generally told what jobs they must do. It might have been different a long time ago (when I lived there as a kid, the mountain overlooking our house featured a giant hammer-and-sickle formed from boulders, which I'm told has since been destroyed).
Life is full of choices. If I have the choice to buy products made in a country who has a history of treating their workers respectfully, I do so. Even little things: I like fasteners made by company called Spax, for instance. Their manufacturing happens either in Germany or not so far from me in Bryan, Ohio (also home of the Etch-a-Sketch), and either one is perfectly fine with me and -vastly- preferable over anything which might be Chinese in origin because I can be reasonably certain that their workers are well-paid.
But given a choice between China and Mexico, I prefer Mexico, just because anything I can do to support my neighbors to the south is far preferable to supporting a country on the other side of the world. Put simply: I'd rather see Mexico's economy do well, than see China's do the same, since the former will have a greater positive influence on the economy of my own country.
And it's just the neighborly thing to do.
Kid-proof tablet..
The problem with your argument is thus, Humans are NOT the ultimate resource but SMART humans ARE. the problem is the smart are NOT breeding in any real numbers while the dumb as fuck, barely able to count their change total retards are popping out kids by the pile. Hell didn't you see that story that went around last week about the guy that had THIRTY KIDS and wanted them to cut down his child support because he only makes minimum wage (and frankly always will) even though divided up among that many damned kids they each get on average $1.94 a month?
Sadly what we are seeing is the simple fact that while a comedy Idiocracy is rapidly becoming reality. When you have someone with a 90 IQ frankly education will only go so far, because just as you can't train someone without the genetically gifted muscle type (lack of lactic acid buildup but off the top of my head i can't remember if there is a term for it) to be a world class or even state level sprinter you simply can't turn people with 80 to 90 IQ into rocket scientists, it simply can NOT be done.
Whether you choose to believe it or not frankly a HELL of a lot of the work at the bottom of the ladder in the USA right now is simply "make work" that wouldn't be feasible if the government didn't pay for it by taking it out of your pocket. Walmart even shows a training video on how to apply for food stamps for Pete's sake! Do you HONESTLY think if those government programs disappeared tomorrow it would be cheaper for the stores like Walmart to pay a living wage than to simply automate?
In the end we are playing IQ musical chairs and more and more simply will never get a seat. Most of the minimum wage jobs in the USA could be replaced by machines tomorrow if government programs didn't artificially tilt the favor for humans. Hell you could replace most fast food with automated assembly quite easily, stocking shelves with robots, self checkout lines, hell you could even replace most plumbers and electricians by just using prefabbed homes.
Whether we like it or not the day is RAPIDLY approaching where capitalism, like every other ism before it, will simply fail. If the workers can't trade their labor for capital then how is capitalism gonna survive? We are already seeing the beginnings of it by how so few at the top can control so much of the capital while it becomes ever harder for those at the bottom to rise above anything but poverty because they simply can't get the capital required to advance from labor alone. Did you know you can put the ones that control over 80% of the capitol in your average HS gym and still have seats left over? This is a sign that the system is failing because otherwise those workers killing themselves daily would be able to work their way into that club but the majority just can't.
In the end it just doesn't work friend, you have nearly half a billion people in the USA alone and with just current technology you could get by just fine without any real losses with just 1/5th of that number. Mark my words the next bubble to burst will be the education bubble as millions go into debt they will never be able to pay only to find that the jobs simply don't exist. With robots and computers frankly we just DO NOT NEED all of these people, so short of make work or handouts you are gonna have some major upheavals as all these unneeded people aren't simply gonna wander off and die, they WILL fight back any way they can. But in the end one simply can't escape the simple fact that we have millions more people than we have jobs that need doing.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.