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Google To Close Its American Moto X Factory
An anonymous reader writes "After only one year in operation, Google's Moto X factory in Fort Worth, TX, is scheduled to close at the end of 2014. The decision to close apparently has nothing to do with Google's decision to sell Motorola Mobility to Lenovo and everything to do with poor sales numbers and high labor and shipping costs in the U.S. The factory had, at one point, employed 3,800 people. Their ranks now number at about 700. Moto E and Moto G, newer and cheaper iterations of Moto X, have sold in more profitable numbers overseas, so Google's original rationale of building phones nearer to the largest customer base to decrease time between assembly and delivery to end user will unsurprisingly force the closure of the U.S.-based factory and transfer labor overseas as well."
...ships product regularly, I have watched domestic shipping costs triple over the last 6-7 years. I understand what Motorola is saying even if I am disappointed by it.
remove Health Care from jobs and then labor costs will come down. Out side of the usa your job does not control your Health Care
remove Health Care from jobs and then labor costs will come down. Out side of the usa your job does not control your Health Care
Someone has to pay for the health care. Remove insurance from health care and then health care costs will come down. Outside of the USA, an insurance company does not need to profit for you to get health care.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Perhaps they would have sold better with a removable SD card.
The timing probably meant a two-way squeeze: As Google's wholly owned phone vassal, they presumably had an incentive to design with an eye toward Google's objectives(which, based on the devices chosen for 'Nexus' status, and Android's evolution in handling SD cards, apparently point toward a bright and glorious future where your phone ships with enough flash for the initramfs, which then downloads everything else From The Cloud...); but as Google's newly wholly owned phone vassal, it would have seriously soured some OEM relationships if they had immediately been crowned maker-of-all-things-Nexus-for-life and generally showered with favored treatment(and, while Google ownership did induce them to de-shit their "blur" nonsense in favor of shipping decent handsets, which probably saved them from further self-induced bleeding, it wasn't really marked by much overt coddling from Mountain View.)
There are dozens phones, each with one minuscule feature that sets it apart from the rest. The market is saturated. Verizon's website shows 31 different smartphones and most of those will roll off and be replaced within a year. And, judging by the pricing, they apparently can't even give the Motorolas away.
Remove health insurance companies from the equation, go to a single payer system, and then things will get far better. The US spends twice as much on health care than the next country on the list, Norway... and we have jack and shit to show for it because the money goes into the insurance companies and flies overseas, forever out of the US economy.
Silly socialist! The risk of agonizing death from some untreated illness just incentivizes lazy poor people to work harder.
Not until the paramedics check your credit history before they check your vital signs will America be truly great again!
Why must labor cost in US be high ?
Because the high cost of living is high in the US.
I agree, make health care a social right and decouple it from employment and income. It would be interesting to see what the CEOs come up with to blame for the next rounds of layoffs.
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
I'll donate an old bath tub for this mission. Keeping my towel tho.
$
I'm very picky about my phones: had an HTC from 3.5 years ago, but when the 2 years came up I couldn't find a suitable replacement until I finally went with the MotoX. First off, let me make it clear--this is a fantastic phone, one of (if not the) best, and for many reasons. One of the reasons I went with it was the made-in-America bit, but honestly, I don't see another alternative--made in America or elsewhere--that's this good. That having been said, the next-closest contender was a Samsung, and I would still stick with the Google flagship phone over the Samsung regardless of manufacturing location--unfortunately, Lenovo's entrance has completely turned me off from buying another Motorola phone after this. I hope my MotoX lasts a long time...
Everywhere I look it's Samsung, Samsung. My personal experience after having two Samsung phones and two Motorola phones is that Samsung has prettier LCDs and better cameras but their quality sucks. They are constantly locking up or working very slowly. But... everywhere I look the advertising is all about Samsung. Has Google even tried to market it's Motorola stuff? The last time I saw anyone pushing Motorola was back when the kiosk guys at the mall kept stopping people to look at the Lap Dock. I have one now, btw.. I love it! But... I was never going to buy one at their price! I bought it used and cheap after they discontinued them.
REALLY tempted to get one of the wood backed ones, but seriously.. Fuck AT&T.
Well, that and my old-man eyes really like the Note series screens (with the caveat that the Note 2 is the largest I want to go. It's already pushing the "will it fit in my pocket" test limit).
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
Why is it that as a Canadian I pay some insane shipping costs but when I order stuff from Ebay/Chinese vendors I get it really fast and 1/5 the shipping price. Go figure....
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
Every American is entitled to own a house with three bathrooms and drive five cars.
Well, you can't have that, but if you're an American citizen you are entitled to: a heated kidney-shaped pool, a microwave oven (don't watch the food cook!), a Dyna-Gym (I'll personally demonstrate it in the privacy of your own home), a king-size Titanic unsinkable Molly Brown waterbed with polybendum, a foolproof plan and an airtight alibi, real simulated Indian jewelry, a Gucci shoe tree, a year's supply of antibiotics, a personally autographed picture of Randy Mantooth and Bob Dylan's new unlisted phone number, a beautifully restored 3rd Reich swizzle stick, Rosemary's baby, a dream date in kneepads with Paul Williams, a new Matador, a new mastodon, a Maverick, a Mustang, a Montego, a Mercury Montclair, a Mark IV, a meteor, a Mercedes, an MG, or a Malibu, a Mort Moriarty, a Maserati, a Mack truck, a Mazda, a new Monza, or a moped, a Winnebago--Hell, a herd of Winnebago's we're giving 'em away, or how about a McCulloch chainsaw, a Las Vegas wedding, a Mexican divorce, a solid gold Kama Sutra coffee pot, or a baby's arm holding an apple?
No left turn unstoned.
Technology should be employed to address the human condition of Food, Education, Shelter and Medical treatment.
Instead, we use technology to build weapons, shiny trinkets to enforce a consumerist lifestyle which is destructive.
We are branching out into using technology now to control and subjugate most of humanity so that a new dark age can take hold.
If it isn't stopped there won't be any intelligent life on this planet.
Perhaps we will find out why after half a century of looking for E.T., nobody answers is because Intelligent life tends to snuff itself out.
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
Democrat president Franklin Delano Roosevelt tried to control the economy; During WWII he froze wages. Like any typical politician of either party, he failed to foresee the obvious and predictable response of the much-more-nimble business community. Businesses rapidly found another way to boost compensation in order to keep/attract the best employees; something the employees would happily take because it would be even more valuable than cash: "health insurance". Prior to this time, most Americans paid their health costs out-of-pocket and did not have health insurance. After the wage freeze, employees got their frozen pay PLUS health insurance (whose value was NOT TAXED) that would pay their medical bills (allowing them to NOT spend their limited and taxed cash on healthcare). Once this trend started, it proved impossible to break; now we all expect our employers to "give" us health insurance and we all expect not to be taxed for it.
This replacement-for-money (health insurance) we can "spend" getting healthcare does not "feel" like money to us and cannot be "spent" elsewhere so it becomes a driver of healthcare cost inflation. First, we do not feel financial pain when we use it (sort of like using credit cards versus cash). Second, we are insulated from rising medical prices (we are promised a benefit, not a price tag) so it has become a convenient way for the government to further tax us - by underpaying for medicare and medicaid services, which causes hospitals and doctors to shift the costs to the bills of people with private health insurance.
Obamacare will likely destroy this linkage. There's SOME poetic symmetry to one liberal Democrat undoing the economic distortion caused by a previous liberal Democrat... but that'll likely be of little consolation to the people who will no longer have an employer on their side in matters related to health insurance. Most Americans have depended upon corporate HR people spending lots of time comparing the costs and benefits of various vendors and policies, negotiating the best deals possible, and intervening when there are problems. After Obamacare fully kicks-in (probably in 2017 - it's tough to be sure given the dozens of arbitrary waivers and extensions in place) people will likely pick whatever policy looks "best" to on a government website and then when things go wrong nobody will be there to help them. Most people will probably pick policies about as well as they pick their food and thier 401K investments - which means they'll do a much worse job than their employer's HR people used to do. I actually support the idea of sparating insurance from employment, but I think it ought to have been done VERY differently and much more explicitly (perhaps by initially changing the laws so that individuals and small businesses were treated the same as big employers on health insurance (which has NOT been the case historically)
so you just make the phones in china and they magically appear in stores?
you still got to ship them all over the country if you want to sell the chunks of crap
Such laws (banning or regulating various "sin" related things like sex toys, porn, alcohol, etc) were common throughout the US for decades. Each state has changed or deleted these types of regulations and bans over time at their own pace (so in each instance SOME state is going to be last). The repeals have often been MANY years after they stopped enforcing them and most people forgot they were even on the books (lookup local laws related to transportation or pesky animals for some laughs). In this particular case, these laws were put in place with wording that would make them unlikely to hurt individuals but would be problematic for "sex shops" (which have generally be considered "undesireable" neighors) while not using language that specifically targeted those shops (making them more-easily struck down by virtue of being targeted legislation). The There are still thousands of crazy-sounding laws on the books all across the country - many in places like CA and NY which so many people consider "progressive".
It's a great political tactic to sling something like this into a conversation as a quasi-clever sleight to Texas (and by implication right-wingers) but the effect is lost on those of us with an education.
... which was a great idea, but extremely poorly executed.
The Moto G and Moto E is really amazing for what it is - budget phones that have all the right things - IPS screen, snappy processor, good software, respectable brand, LTE (on E and Gv2), etc. It sells extremely well in the UK and many other markets in the EU.
If they opened up a factory in the UK or somewhere else in the EU, it may be 10-15 pounds more expensive to make than in China, but still there would be plenty of takers. In fact probably more so as it is manufactured locally and in an advanced economy - a sign of quality in its own right. The Raspberry Pi is made in the UK, and they were able to pretty much match cost with the batches produced in China.
:. Ultimate Control Dedicated/VM Servers
Robots don't need health care...
Welcome to 21st century manufacturing.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
In Republican controlled Texas?
Je ne parle pas francais.
Moto X was a relatively expensive phone, with low specs. If you had $600 dollars to spend on a phone (either yourself or through contract subsidies), there would be very little reason to pick Moto X. The main attraction of the Moto X is that there are many variants in terms of colors and materials, and that's what you pay a premium for. Problem is, in this price range you already have lots of choices for very nicely designed phones, many with better specs. What's left is a niche market that is willing to pay a premium for stuff like a wooden phone back on a otherwise mediocre phone. That's still some market. However, I don't see how you can expect that to sell as well as a cheap phone with good specs like Moto G.
Also, the article suggests in tone that Moto X and phones like Moto X sell better in asia, but the fact is Moto X hasn't sold well anywhere. It's just completely different phones like Moto G that are doing well.
I remember hearing the same thing during the Carter administration. Its nothing new. What *is* new is that we now realize that maybe the Japanese didn't wreck the US economy all by themselves - instead our own 1%-ers did. The Japs were just a handy scapegoat to deflect the blame - "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!" -style of distraction.
C|N>K
I don't know what brand loyalty is like but in my country it'd be
1. Apple
2. Samsung
3. HTC.
4. Sony xperia
5. Whatever market share is left of BB and Nokia
6. Moto and LG.
Does the USA have a strong 'buy American' ethos still?
I figure they'd have done better if they ditched the Motorola brand and just marketed Google phones.
In Republican controlled Texas?
It doesn't matter. Unions are a right-wing bogeyman that gets blamed regardless of any rational analysis of their effect, or even whether they exist. For table thumping rhetoric, a really good bogeyman needn't b real. All you have to do is get a few million people to reflexively parrot it. This avoids the trouble of actually thinking, which makes some people's heads hurt.
I'm sure everybody making $12/hr has all that and more. They may even get to put food on the table, and live indoors (providing it's a low cost-of-living area).
Does the USA have a strong 'buy American' ethos still?
How can you tell if something is actually made in America. That label on the box just says where it's assembled. The exception is cars, which must be labelled by total value added in the US, not just assembly. I have a car that's 85% value added in the USA. It's a good old-fashioned American brand called "Toyota". 85% is much higher than most so-called American cars.
It doesn't have to be single-payer. Germany has over 100 healthinsurancecompanies (German style spelling), but they're non-profit and heavily regulated. Works for Switzerland and a number of other countries too.
health insurance companies are bureaucratic nightmares even with Obamacare. It's worse now than it was a year ago but we also have to look at why it's that way and start simplifying things, also start barring the health care industry from charging laissez faire prices for everything, that's the root cause here outrageous prices that outstrip inflation and have no bearing in reality. If healthcare is critical to an economy it's time to start regulating it and break up these damn health care/hospital consortiums that do nothing but eliminate competition and drive up costs. You have hospital administrators making over a million a year at some hospitials, how does that scale with what their service delivery is?
Last November I had to take my wife into the emergency room for a minor rash, It was a night so an urgent care facility wasn't open. Anyway for 30 minutes of work, doctor charged $1200, Hospital $1300 and all they did was give her the RX equivalent of of OTC meds, about $40, that's what the bill showed. Insurance covered most of it (fucking deductibles) but at most she was seen for no more than 5 minutes by the doctor. They even stuck on a $200 "after hours" fee on the bill, it's an emergency room for Christ sake! It's this kind of highway robbery that's killing the economy and single payer won't fix it, what'll fix it is for all of us to stop considering doctors/hospitals as above market forces and start some RICO law enforcement!
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
Yes, its a bogeyman, and totally false as a reason for our uncompetitiveness. The real reason is US income taxes. They make manufacturing here too expensive. Repeal the income taxes, and go back to work, and have your non-college-educated friends and relatives go back to work, in factories, building things that were formerally built in China, India, Korea, Japan, Canada, Mexico, Germany, Italy, etc.
Duh, EVERYTHING costs more in the USA. That's why lotsa people buy stuff overseas. Our high cost of living is legendary. So why are U surprised when healthcare is $2X.
Single payer would get gov't involved, which is ALWAYS guaranteed to cost more or deliver less or deliver it waaaaay slower. The US Gov't cannot do FAST, CHEAP, and GOOD all at once. They just can't. The US military is FAST and GOOD, but it sure as hell ain't cheap. The US Post Office is Cheap and Good, but not necessarily fast, at least not at the cheap price.
Germany's payroll tax for healthcare purposes is 41%. Look it up. Want to be paying 41% of everything you make, from the 1st dollar up to the last, because of healthcare?
I pay $194/month as a retiree for former-employer-subsidized healthcare. I would expect that to go to about $1500 / month from a private company on the open market. Do I want my retirement reduced to deciding to pay the electric bill or affording my medicine due to the O'care high-deductibles? Nope. Leave this the hell alone, so I can have a good retirement.
Want to really help the American people? Pass the Fair Tax, which would put everyone back to work and they could then buy their own healthcare without the gov't getting involved in paying for it.
Nice Tubes reference.
sigs are for losers (except to point out that sigs are for losers)
The income tax really doesn't hurt the top guys. They have their tax havens overseas.
A VAT would be useful, because you can't hide a Maybach like you can some bonds in an offshore account. However, sales taxes are regressive in general, and again, the burden of it would be on the shoulders of people buying basic stuff to survive.
A tax system is a debate into itself. You need a number of factors in it:
1: Some progressive-ness. People just getting by need a bit of help, so it can't just be taxing food, housing and other staples for survival. A percentage point or two on a luxury car might be better than taxing WIC goods.
2: Enforcability. You get to a certain wealth level in the US, you pay $0 in taxes. You don't want a "soak the rich" mentality, but there is always having people pay their fair share. If income taxes could be enforced, it would bring a better share of revenue.
3: Encouragement/discouragement. In some circumstances, it might be better to tax some good heavily rather than outright ban it. On the other hand, it might be better to have no taxes on certain goods in order to get people to go buy it. LED bulbs come to mind as something to encourage people to buy.
The Fair Tax sounds interesting, but it puts the tax burden on the people who can least afford it.
No, the income tax doesn't really hurt the top guys all that much, they can take care of themselves. But, it _does_ hurt the businesses. The businesses are forced to raise the prices for their goods and services to pay the taxes on their operations, and they _don't_ get that money by diminishing in any way the salaries of the top guys.
The DO raise the prices of their products, and the DO lower the pay of their workers, and they DO reduce the payout of the dividends on their stocks. The money that the public would have saved and the money the employees would have earned and the dividends that the investors would have enjoyed instead is stolen by the US Gov't.
I say stolen because it is taken by force by people to whom it does not belong. I've come to the conclusion, after a lifetime of attempting to rationalize it, that income taxes are purely and simply stealing. I can find no good reason to excuse the gov't from that charge. The gov't doesn't have the right to everyone's property. It has the power to take it, but not the right. No kidding, I always used to wonder about that as soon as I heard about it in grade school, "What gives them the right?" Well, they don't have the right, simply the power.
You should take a much closer look at the Fair Tax. The FT is the only tax so far proposed that is truly progressive. The income taxes aren't - Warren Buffet ends up paying 14%, and his secretary pays, what was it, 18%? What's progressive about that? The payroll taxes supporting social security and Medicare cease being collected at the point that the person makes about $118K, but are collected from the 1st dollar that a poor person makes. A poor person that makes $12K / yr ends up sending 15.3% of that to Washington, DC.
In contrast, the FT "prebates" each citizen with the amount of $$$ that they would need to pay the FT on poverty level spending. That is, if one is single, and the poverty level is $12K, that person would receive 23% of $12,000 each year to pay the FT on all the things he would buy up to the poverty level. So, that person will get $2,760 each year, divided up into 12 equal monthly payments. It doesn't matter whether that person is a single person that is as rich as Bill Gates, or your favorite street person panhandling on a street corner, he will get that prebate.
Due to the prebate, no person effectively pays the Fair Tax. When he buys something, he reaches into the pocket with the money he earned or panhandled or whatever, and pays the price of the item he's buying, and then reaches into the pocket that has the money he received from the gov't as a prebate and pays the Fair Tax. That pocket will continue to provide money to pay the Fair Tax all the way up until he spends his last dollar that is at the poverty level for the month. Then, the prebate runs out and the person has to start paying the Fair Tax on remaining items he buys for the month, until his next prebate check comes the following month. Of course, if he's making poverty level wages, he is not capable of spending more than the poverty level, and so NEVER pays the Fair Tax himself.
And I took a look at the Flat Tax once upon a time and discovered that while it purports to give a break to people for the first $X dollars they make, which I think was somewhere around $18K, it DOES NOT repeal the payroll taxes. Therefore it charges its 17% flat tax rate to _AND_ the 15.3% payroll taxes to the person starting at $18K (or whatever the exemption is, I forget) and so the middle class pays 32.3% tax to the gov't, while the payroll tax stops taxing the rich at around $118K, so the rich making much, much higher than $118K end up being taxed very close to 17% Flat Tax for their entire earnings. Poor: 15.3% Middle Class: 32.3% Rich: 17% plus a fraction. Progressive? Nope. Only the Fair Tax is progressive.
And there are side benefits to the Fair Tax such as not having to spend $13B on the IRS, since the states collect the monies, and we can even go green by not cutting
41%. See it here. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L... It also supports their Social Security as well as the healthcare. Pretty steep.
I pay $194/month as a retiree for former-employer-subsidized healthcare....
Want to really help the American people? Pass the Fair Tax, which would put everyone back to work and they could then buy their own healthcare without the gov't getting involved in paying for it.
The "Fair Tax" sounds an awfully lot more fair when you're not spending 90% of your salary just to get by.
I don't think you've read and understood the Fair Tax. No poor person pays even a penny of Fair Tax. I'm right in the middle of the middle class, and would save $2K a year with the Fair Tax. Your taxes would probably be lower too.
Generally speaking, basics are tax-exempt. At least the base foods - prepared and processed foods are generally taxed.
And sales taxes are among the most efficient of all taxes - for every dollar in sales tax collected, the impact to the economy is around $0.05 or so (i.e., the economy would be bigger by 5 cents had that dollar not been taken).
Income taxes though are the most disruptive - for every dollar collected, it costs the economy $1.05 or more (i.e., the economy loses $1.05 for every dollar collected).