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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 ...
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[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
They're probably just trying to take advantage of that cheap American labor...
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 :)
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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.
Toshiba and Sony, quality laptops? Why do you want to kill us with laughter so early in the morning?
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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.