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Lenovo Announces Grand Opening of US Manufacturing Facility
Kohenkatz writes "Chinese PC maker Lenovo had a ceremony [Wednesday] to mark the official grand opening of their new manufacturing facility in Whitsett, North Carolina. The 240,000-square-foot facility, located approximately 10 miles east of Greensboro, NC, was already being used as a Logistics Center, Customer Solutions Center, and National Returns Center, and is now also being used for Production. While actual line operations began in January 2013, the facility is on track to reach full operation by the end of June. The facility is equipped to build several types of Think-branded products, including desktops, tablets, and ultrabooks. Note that due to the extensive use of automation, the factory only adds 115 manufacturing jobs at the facility."
This is probably aimed at some of the issues Lenovo's been having with people inferring that, because Lenovo's a Chinese company, that the Think line of computers are now unsuitable for business and government purposes due to the possibility of back doors and spyware build directly into firmware/hardware.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Well that's the hope.
A fully automated factory would be totally awesome.
It's actually happened...
Now Chinese are outsourcing to us
Also, globalization at its finest.
May the overlords look back at you in fondness !!
If the 115 employees all work the same shift and are uniformly distributed, then each would have 2086 square feet of floor space. That's a minimum spacing of 45.7 feet (13.9 meters) between employees!
Correction: 45.7 feet between the _center of mass_ of each employee. So if we further assume the employees are spherical ...
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
Next step, build robotic consumers to buy the products.
With Bitcoins.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
Next step, build automated factories to build automated factories to build laptops and robotic consumers.
They're probably just trying to take advantage of that cheap American labor...
Does this mean the jobs are washing back over the Pacific? But... I only got replaced by an Asian worker being paid one tenth what I was for a third the quality of work a half a year ago! Guess my vacation is over...
Will it automate servicing the machines that build the other machines? Those grease fittings, bearings, valves, flow meters, circuit breakers, tool dies, taps, drills, and other things don't service themselves you know...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Actually the next step would be to replace capitalism, as it no longer makes sense in a post-scarcity society.
Without the poor and middle class, you can't have rich people. It's not strictly about money, it's about exclusivity - and money is an easy way to be exclusive. Capitalism in a post-scarcity society is all about maintaining class in a more traditional way, and (almost) nobody gives up what is "theirs" to others - especially those who value exclusivity and are currently at the top of the economic food chain.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Yeah, now that all those African children with aids and flies are all riding around on luxury yachts, we don't need capitalism anymore.
Would they not want more exclusivity?
By that I mean us peons will be driving robot made cars, but the 1%s will demand only hand crafted one off cars.
In the usa you can't get away with lot of stuff that been happening at foxconn.
Those grease fittings, bearings, valves, flow meters, circuit breakers, tool dies, taps, drills, and other things don't service themselves you know...
For now. Biological life shows that having a closed, self-sustaining complex system perpetuating itself by mere flow of energy and raw materials is not only conceivable but actually a reasonable proposition.
Ezekiel 23:20
Will it automate servicing the machines that build the other machines? Those grease fittings, bearings, valves, flow meters, circuit breakers, tool dies, taps, drills, and other things don't service themselves you know...
Not yet. But they will. It used to be that we needed humans to take parts from place to place in a factory, and do stuff to them. Then taking stuff from place to place was automated, the parts not only come down a belt or a chute but they get placed and fixed for the next step as well. The same will happen with the machines as well. A robot will trundle around and replace big compartmentalized components of the machines at first, with the big components sent out for rebuild. Later, the robots will reach into the modules and replace parts like bearings, but they'll do the job much better and faster than any human. Instead of holding a puller in their hand, they'll wear a hand which is a puller/pusher, though they may supply bearings to it with a humanlike hand so that it can easily handle a broad variety of sizes and styles.
Tooling changes are already made by machine. It won't be long before the tooling is also restocked by a machine. We only don't do it now because we have really amazing tooling that lasts for some time, and there's not sufficient cost savings in it. It's cheaper to pay humans to run around and do these jobs because there are not standardized robots capable of doing them. Barring global cataclysm it's only a matter of time :)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
A computer built in the US and shipped via American carriers is significantly less likely to be tampered with in transit. In China, you're trusting that there are no "stops" between the factory and the dock.
It's just a step in the right direction. In that sense and that sense alone you are more correct than wrong.
That was Steve Jobs' original vision at NeXT --- a fully-automated factory where raw materials came in one end and finished computers the other. http://www.nytimes.com/1990/12/24/business/all-next-inc-s-plant-lacks-is-orders.html
The problem of course is how to sustain people who aren't / can't work. For a pessimistic view on this look at Manny by Marshall Brain: http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
Please China give us jobs and food on the table.
Don't make me laugh.
You know the US has hit rock bottom when the Chinese start opening factories here because of cheaper labour. :)
Okay, then who'll service the machine that services the machines?
And if it's a machine, who or what will service that machine?
And that machine?
All serious aside, my original comment was intended partially as a joke. Obviously the better the original design of a machine the less service it will need in its intended lifespan, but as humans that design things are not infalliable, there inevitably will be things that are missed. We sent the most expensive mirror in human history at the time of its construction into space in a flawed state, to the point that the rest of the instrument had to be redesigned around the faulty mirror.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
But it's amorphous and has no real goal, and is fragile and has a tendency toward chaos rather than order. It also functions because it has no designer, as opposed to the ordered design of a factory or other ostensibly-closed system that has a specific purpose.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
This has to do with government mandates that discourage purchasing computers manufactured in China. This does nothing to prevent the existence of back doors or spyware, but it makes the uninformed people who vote for those politicians feel good.
I think you hit the nail on the head with your comment.
Too bad it was a robot-made hammer hitting the nail.
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Have a link to back that assertion up? I've not seen any Thinkpads in the past year or two which suck; the opposite is true: they all seem to be of surprisingly rugged quality.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
A machine servicing machine certainly can service another machine servicing machine. Just like doctors go to see a a doctor when they need medical help.
and has a tendency toward chaos rather than order.
I thought that just about everything in this universe has a tendency towards chaos.
It also functions because it has no designer, as opposed to the ordered design of a factory or other ostensibly-closed system that has a specific purpose.
Well, in that case, it will either have to be self-adjusting or will require some limited maintenance on the organization level (as in a few people steering the system in a certain direction by means of programming, not maintenance as in getting your hands dirty).
Ezekiel 23:20
It is the sequel to "build robotic governator to rule the customers".
Toshiba and Sony, quality laptops? Why do you want to kill us with laughter so early in the morning?
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
Now, let's get some design and engineering departments out here because they obviously don't know shit about it out there. Seriously, have you *seen* the atrocity that is the current iteration of ThinkPad?
It's not a law of nature that your income needs to come from work. It's just that up to now, there has always been work that had to be done by humans, and since most humans don't like to do work, it was a good idea to couple your income (which basically determines your share of the produced goods) to your work (which was what produced those goods in the first place). The more the productivity is decoupled from human work, the less sense does it make to couple human income to work. When robots are able to do any work that needs to be dome, coupling income to work is nonsensical. There still needs to be some sort of income, so that the still scarce resources can be justly distributed and no one is taking an unfair share, but the income will no longer be bound to the work you do.
To those who will now come out to tell how this sounds like communism, and how communism failed: Not a single communist country had automated even a non-negligible fraction of production, let alone all of it. Indeed, even in today's capitalist countries, we are still quite far from that point, despite all that automation which already happened, which is why we still need work-bound income. So the fact that communism failed in a non-automated world tells you exactly nothing about how well such a system would work in a fully automated work.
Its not just about longest life; support after the fact is important too. I've had to work on lots of Sony laptops. They are, by far, some of the worst laptops out there. Hard to get parts for, loaded with bloatware, poor software support (good luck trying to find drivers even 3 years after manufacturing), and extremely poor quality hinges on the displays. And MSI? More crap. I love their motherboards, but its a revolving door with their laptops. Asus has been very good though.
Completely disagree with this. My company uses Thinkpads, my girlfriend's company uses Thinkpads, and I use an Ideapad for my personal computer, and I can attest that the quality of all 3 computers is significantly high.
There is no way to replace capitalism or free markets without using force and the threat of violence to scare every single human being into submission and eliminate those who won't submit.
Then, you're right back to the system of haves(the enforcers) and have-nots(everyone else) that you were trying to replace.
these arent really the kinds of jobs americans need. these will be 115 individuals of borderline cognitive function that load dispensers, change lightbulbs and drive forklifts. the jobs wont pay anywhere near a living wage, will likely specify "mandatory overtime" and preferentially select individuals who either have no concept of formal unionized labour or have had the notion beaten out of them from years of walmart servitude. Turnover will be high, regulation will be sparse. in this case the local government simply decided to go on a cocksucking contest and award absurd tax breaks for a factory that will likely leave the people as well as the state worse off than they were had the corporation never set foot.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Honestly not sure I can say much about about quality comparisons, but I can say in 2012 they had number one market share in terms of sales to corporate customers worldwide [Source: Gartner]. Fourth in the US, but still, I would hardly say only morons buy them.
That's actually where most of the new jobs are going - the machines generally need daily maintenance and service and handling when things are just a bit off. But for the most part, all the dull boring jobs that took thousands of Chinese workers to do are replaced by robots.
Manufacturing is not generally a nice job - it's boring mind-numbing work that really you do automate because with few exceptions, most people will not want to do it. The few exceptions would be those whose job consisted of a bit more than "put part A in slot B" once a second for 8 hours - e.g., heavy machinery manufacture (cars, trucks, etc) where people get 2 minutes to put on a part but in general at least have other coworkers to take the dullness out of the job.
But robot maintenance and others are generally nice high-skilled trade jobs - especially ones that have to fix them when they break down and halt production. Of course, the robots are probably replacing 10-20 Chinese workers easily.
What do we do went human labour is a product that no one needs to buy? Why worry about the big evil socialist government stealing the product of your labour when your labour isn't worth anything?
Well then maybe the rich should compete with each other to see how many poor people they can maintain in the greatest amount of comfort and luxury? Some already keep pets in great luxury.
Seriously though, there will NEVER be a post scarcity society. Most educated people normally try not to have more children than they can afford to support. But if someone else foots the bill completely many people may start breeding like rabbits. Then as the population increases you eventually hit scarcity again.
So like it or not, there'll never be a "post scarcity" society, there will be limits one way or another. The tricky bit is how best to set those limits for the maximum good.
If your pet dog could vote and kept full reproductive rights and other freedoms, you wouldn't be so happy feeding him and his generations of numerous descendants. No matter how cute they are.
Robotic consumers have been around for a long, long time.
I don't foresee a time when my labour is worth nothing. Even if I'm doing subsistence-level farming, my work produces value.
I'd rather eke out a living that way than live life as a drone in an anonymous apartment with a government approved # of square meters, a government approved food ration, a government approved energy ration, etc. etc.
Robots are going to replace humans, so we need to force humans to be more robotic?
Employment in manufacturing is down against steady and healthy growth of the industry in the US due to automation. If you open a manufacturing plant you're going to get a small number of jobs for an operation of such size and cost, maybe some local robot purchases if you're lucky. If you want jobs, buy some time by finding an industry that can't be automated so easily. We don't rely on farms or textile plants for jobs anymore but nobody got the memo about manufacturing in general. I know it has that nice folksy blue-collar "we're MAKING stuff!" image but you have to let it go.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Capitalism, more than any other system, makes possible the change of economic prosperity of worthy individuals, where "worthy" means "provides things other people want."
That's inflammatory and misleading language, which implies that the rich are suppressing the others. It assumes that rich and poor can only be used as relative terms; that there can be no absolute standard of rich and poor.
In a just, productive society, the accumulation of personal property over time assures that any reasonable, fixed standard of "poor" includes a steadily decreasing portion of people.
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Okay, then who'll service the machine that services the machines?
And if it's a machine, who or what will service that machine?
And that machine?
I dunno, who treats your doctor? And your doctor's doctor?
We are not about to step into a post-scarcity society, so that's really irrelevant.
... still waiting for this free-as-in-beer free beer I keep hearing about.
"Need" and "want" are different things. Some people will always want human labor or its results. "Hand crafted" always has its market.
So many errors in one sentence! Labor will never be worthless. The underlying purpose of socialism is not to steal the product of your labor. It isn't even to steal your labor (slavery), although that's closer. It is to have total control over all aspects of everyone. Take a look at the trend of government education, where the goal is to control your mind.
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[Citation needed]
FCKGW 09F9 42
Some people could choose to buy "hand crafted" and some people could choose to make it. That doesn't mean it would be anything like the situation we have now when virtually everyone has to sell their labour to someone (slavery).
"It is to have total control over all aspects of everyone."
This is the first I've heard of this. Can you explain further.
The only alternative to the dreary yoke of capitalism which you can imagine is force, threat, violence, and submission? But capitalism is already the concentration of wealth into the hands of the privileged.
Capitalism is ownership of the means of production by the privileged few. Socialism is ownership of the means of production by a faceless, merciless central state bureacracy in the name of the people taken as a mass. There is a better way. Distributism is ownership of the means of production spread as widely as possible among the people: individuals and small local cooperatives. Something like a system of guilds replaces the confrontational, adversarial labor unions and vast corporations of capitalism, or the smashing of individual enterprise entailed by socialism.
When people are no longer pitted against other people (capitalism), or against the imposition of mass regimentation (socialism), brotherly love and charity could flourish.
Let those of limited daring and imagination say why we have to submit to terrible, evil systems. The rest of us can dream of a better way and seek to make it happen.
I'll supervise.
There are several security loopholes here that China could theoretically exploit. Lenovo moving some manufacturing here is an attempt by them to deliberately close one of the big ones, which is what happens to goods in transit between them and their customers. The Chinese intelligence services are extremely unlikely to send people to US soil to pull some stunt because the last thing they'd want is for people connected to a program to sabotage American computer products to be practically in the federal government's lap.
All serious aside, my original comment was intended partially as a joke.
The best jokes are always based on the truth, though, so if you have a particularly good joke you're probably near an insightful comment... or you could be, if someone took the time to leave it. Sometimes, I do.
The serious answer to your question is that for a while these things will go out to human rebuilders in centralized locations, but eventually the machines will be standardized to the point that rebuilding is also automated; if the rebuilders are built out of standard components, then no humans need do anything (presuming robots can handle packing and shipping, which ought to be a safe assumption given standardized modules.) And of course, the shipping itself can provably be completely automated, so there's no humans needed there, either.
As robotics technology continues to improve and mature, the need for humans to do work declines, yet we continue to insist that people do the same amount of it, or even more. This is clearly unsustainable...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Indeed, one day your labor will have negative value since it will cost more to keep you alive to work than a robot would cost to do the work.
"The Midas Plague"?
Capitalism is not about exclusivity, it's about private ownership of the mean of productions (and implied is that such ownership is limited to a small group). A different system might still have stratification and class distinctions, but it won't be capitalism.
There is no way to replace capitalism or free markets without using force and the threat of violence to scare every single human being into submission and eliminate those who won't submit.
That's not true. The only thing that makes capitalism possible is society- and state-recognized (and enforced) private property. Which is to say, the government will intervene on your behalf and enforce your claim of ownership on some piece of land or a share in the company that you have never even set a foot in. Rescind that recognition and protection, and capitalism dies overnight.
I'd rather eke out a living that way than live life as a drone in an anonymous apartment with a government approved # of square meters, a government approved food ration, a government approved energy ration, etc. etc.
A post-scarcity society does not need a government to enforce socialism, it will just happen on its own (but it will need a government to enforce property rights that underline capitalism).
Amazing, isn't it? No matter what new system humanity dreams up, what ideals it attests to embrace...it all ultimately degenerates into a single form: that of the master / slave relationship. It's almost like it's a universal constant.
I am John Hurt.
Do you think that "capitalism" itself or some cabal of elites within a system of capitalism is what pits people against each other? I tend to think of that as partially a result of hard-wired behavior. If you start out with the premise that you need to change human nature, or change everyone's viewpoint as a pre-condition to creating a better system, I think that entails force and violence or several generations of effort.
I like your idea of distributed ownership and a more "bottoms up" production system. I think that if we free ourselves of the oppression inflicted on us by the government, that "capitalism" would look much more like what you describe. It is the concentration of power in the hands of government and the use of that power to pick winners and losers in the economy which drives the concentration of wealth. Without bailouts, handouts, subsidies, legal immunity and other special privileges that government hands out to an elite few (most especially the money creation privilege), millions of people could free themselves of the dreary yoke you describe.
I dream of a better way, and I see government and bankers as the primary obstacles.
Health care should be at the government level in the usa and not on the works or employer. Even then they still have to have liability for safety and have and can get fined.
I make a distinction between capitalism, which rewards privilege to a large extent, and free enterprise, which rewards industriousness and talent, though itself it makes no provision for hardship.
I am not so sure I see human attitudes in quite so much the dark light that you do. For example, the majority of people will hold the post office door for you rather than let it slam in your face, give you directions rather than ignore you, tip service givers, say please and thank you, give to organized charity as well as occasionally hand a twenty to someone in the gas station with a sad story, etc - not to mention call 911 for an accident victim. OTOH, most people see their business life in a completely different light than their personal life.
Are you trolling or just stupid?
http://www.pcworld.com/article/2020725/apple-macbooks-lead-in-laptop-features-and-reliability.html
http://www.engadget.com/2009/11/17/laptop-reliability-survey-asus-and-toshiba-win-hp-fails/
So...shut the fuck up. I fix and sell laptops at my shop. You have no idea what you're talking about.
Which is to say, the government will intervene on your behalf and enforce your claim of ownership on some piece of land or a share in the company that you have never even set a foot in. Rescind that recognition and protection, and capitalism dies overnight.
Not necessarily. Individuals can still claim ownership of land or companies, and defend that ownership themselves with guns. Land ownership is natural in any agricultural society (if you work the land, planting seeds and maintaining it, then it makes sense that you own the land), and people defend their property themselves if government doesn't do it for them.
Wouldn't that be meritocracy, rule of the worthy? Unlike capitalism which is rule of the rich?
I have a very good idea of what I'm talking about but my experience is not recent. We used to have nothing but troubles with Toshiba and Sony laptops.
I do agree on the HPs though, I have two friends with HP laptops and they're nothing but trouble on both the low end and the high end models.
So, shut the fuck up yourself.
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It's called Libertarian Socialism.
Not necessarily. Individuals can still claim ownership of land or companies, and defend that ownership themselves with guns.
It's not exactly stable ownership if a guy with a bigger gun can come in and take it away from you at any time. For an example of what economics looks like with such an arrangement, see Somalia.
Land ownership is natural in any agricultural society (if you work the land, planting seeds and maintaining it, then it makes sense that you own the land)
Exactly - if you work the land. In other words, if you occupy it, or otherwise use it. But in our society, you can buy a plot of land ten states away, and it's still yours - and if someone trespasses, the state will protect your property.
It's not even the land that's an issue here, it's means of production in general. Take some large company like Apple - if you own 51% of the company (via stock), you effectively own all the income that it makes, and can choose to pocket it all as you wish. But that is a legal fiction - you're not the company; you don't physically occupy all its offices and plants, and don't "use" it in any way. It's just a legal arrangement whereby all income earned in its name, by people working for it, is assigned to the company, and then to you. If, tomorrow, your property right to those stocks, and to the company, is no longer recognized, what's your recourse? You can still hypothetically force people to recognize it, but you need so many guns for it that you'd become the monopolist on violence - in other words, a government.
Or the robots could buy people.
Or the robots could buy people.
In part, maybe. But really capitalism is about who gets to decide things. In capitalism 1 dollar equals 1 vote. Therefore capitalism is not compatible with democracy.
Capitalism is an economic system, not a political system. It can affect the latter (in that undue concentration of wealth becomes political power in and of itself), but that is not what capitalism is "about".
Slave trade by robot, probably a legal loophole. Some people are virtual slaves to their phones now.
The underlying purpose of socialism is to put social welfare ahead of other things (such as wealth accumulation). The "total control over all aspects" is a corrupted form of socialism, which results when those in power forget whom they serve. Of course, that effect happens in all systems. It isn't inherent in the structure of a socialist society (have you ever visited Germany?) but it probably was inherent in the political structure of the USSR, which is the exampleof socialism that you were taught to hate and despise if you grew up in the USA in the last half of the 20th century.
Capitalism plus robots = high unemployment and rampant poverty
Socialism plus robots = eradication of poverty
There is no way to replace capitalism or free markets without using force and the threat of violence to scare every single human being into submission and eliminate those who won't submit.
Then, you're right back to the system of haves(the enforcers) and have-nots(everyone else) that you were trying to replace.
Not true,
Social systems get replaced when they no longer make sense. Which capitalism (completely separate idea to the free market) wont in a post scarcity society. In this scenario, the only way to prevent the capitalism from being replaced is to use force and violence to keep the old system in place.
Also stop trying to confuse capitalism with the free market. Capitalism can survive and even thrive in controlled markets (see: China) and is more often than not a control on the market itself (see: Monopoly), the difference between a monopolist controlled market and a state controlled market is only who is controlling the market. Capitalism in it's purest form struggles in a truly free market, which is why most western economies operate on mixed ideologies.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Key word being "degenerates". The non-degenerate alternative to parasitism is symbiosis.
Capitalism, more than any other system, makes possible the change of economic prosperity of worthy individuals, where "worthy" means "provides things other people want."
Rupert Murdoch used this idea recently to argue that capitalism was the moral system.* "Worthy" is a red herring here as it carries righteous overtones. Since it is defined in the same sentence we can rewrite as;
Capitalism, more than any other system, makes possible the change of economic prosperity of individuals who provide things other people want."
Now it isn't self-declaring as high-minded. From outside we can then ask, is this fair? Maybe, maybe not, but maybe it's the fairest system we have. One issue is that the concentration of wealth allows those who hold it to change what people want (monopolies, rent seeking).
* Unfortunately he stated that the motivation of greed to provide what others want shows that it is altruistic.
the capitalistic ideal is a competitive free market.
monopolies are in direct contradiction with that ideal
naturally reality only bears a very weak resemblance to that ideal
which arguably is not what we have
our economic system doesn't really care who owns the means of production (or what is produced), what it cares about is who owns the means of exchange (i.e. money), which is why the world is run by bankers and entrepeneurs.
Besides most means of production are not in private ownership, they're instead owned by 'publicly held megacoorporations'
publicly held megacoorporations really aren't that different from western nations
- a group of franchised people gets to vote for a smaller group of representatives (citizens or shareholders)
- that smaller group (parliament or corporate board) then gets to appoint the executive
- the executive (president/minister or CxO) gets to be the guy who makes the decisions (assuming he's not a puppet)
- and in both cases ultimately that's a thin veneer atop a huge bureaucracy.
Yeah, I was thinking that the WPA needs to come back.
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
A "post scarcity society" is a theoretical construct which homo sapiens will probably never achieve. My comment is pertinent to the real world. Yes, if we all lived in The Culture our current economic system would not exist.