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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.
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It's actually happened...
Now Chinese are outsourcing to us
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...
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?
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.
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.
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Toshiba and Sony, quality laptops? Why do you want to kill us with laughter so early in the morning?
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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.
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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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.
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.
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.
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.