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Adidas To Sell Robot-Made Shoes In Germany (dw.com)
Adidas, the German sportswear and equipment maker, has announced that it will start marketing the first series of sports shoes manufactured by robots in Germany from 2017. Deutsche Welle reports: The announcement came as Adidas unveiled its prototype "Speedfactory", a state-of-the-art, 4,600 square-meter facility meant to automate shoe production, which is largely done manually in Asian factories at the moment. The company has struggled with steadily rising wages across the continent, where it employs around a million people. Still, Adidas insisted that the aim was not to immediately replace their workers, saying the goal was not "full automatization".
Decent wages hurt the stockholders.
If that actually becomes technically feasible one day, you can be sure the (by then heavily dongled) plastic filament cartridges will be more expensive then the ready-made shoes.
Ever tried to print a colorful book on an ink-jet printer for the price you can buy a hardcopy?
I'm sure that the robot technicians in Germany will get paid reasonable wages.
I would also love to know why you can't afford to pay me more wages, Mr i_ate_god. After all, I deserve from you what I don't have. Please immediately redistribute your own wages to me.
"Corporations by definition have no decency"
What is your definition of a corporation for you to say they have no decency? As a developer it is not my obligation to pay my cleaning staff more or pay a higher rent than my landlord requires. Is it my responsibility to pay more? If not why is it adidas' responsibility?
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
But the low-paid workers in China had a job. Now they don't.
Actually they still do. They won't have a job some time in the future, if the robotic factory works out.
Hooray for the SJW campaign against exploiting low-paid workers! No longer are those poor souls being exploited! Rejoice that the SJW elite's enlightened ways have scored a victory against capitalist exploitation of developing countries!
The has nothing to do with American politics, and everything to do with Asia's economic development. Companies like Adidas are simply running out of extremely low pay, exploitable workforces. The children of the people who have been working in sneaker sweatshops for the past 20 years are getting educations and aspiring to better jobs, better pay and better lives. Laying this at the feet of SJWs just makes you look unhinged, because this is one of the expected results of the exploitation of low wage jurisdictions; eventually, wages rise to an equivalent level to every other jurisdiction.
So how are those people expected to feed themselves and their families now?
Here's a hint: wages are rising because employers are competing for workers, so they'll probably go work somewhere else, most likely at similar wages, unless the jobs removed when Adidas shut down it's factories represent a large enough percentage of total employment to have a significant impact on the labour market.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
I would love to know why Adidas can't afford to pay decent wages?
No company wants to pay anyone anything. Ever. That's just how it works.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
The continued automation will keep reducing the need for manual labor, freeing people to do other things as the scarcity economy starts to be eliminated.
We've been potentially post-scarcity for many years. There has been enough to go around for ages. It just doesn't go around.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I would love to know why Adidas can't afford to pay decent wages?
This comment is hard to reply to, but I'll try.
The best thing to do would pick up an economics textbook used by any entry-level Macro Econ 101 course.
Basically, you have it backwards. We don't want companies maximizing pay - we want them minimizing cost. Cheaper shoes are good for everyone who buys shoes. The incentive structure for the company is such that they need to keep their production costs as low as possible. They also have incentives to meet demand. In a competitive environment, this meshing of supply and demand means we don't run into shoe shortages and there are plenty of affordable shoes to choose from. Jobs the wages associated will follow similar supply and demand rules. You can fiddle with the system if you want and pin wages, but this obviously effects the demand curve in a direction that you likely aren't going to be pleased with. Left alone, they system will dither (sometimes wildly) around the point of highest efficiency. For shoes, this is probably what we want. For food... well, the dithering is probably not desirable so we can probably afford to trade away some efficiency to avoid periods of starvation.
Now imagine your economic system, where we change the incentive structure to maximize wages. I'd like you to describe how this would work. I think by explaining it, you would find some holes all by yourself without any debate from me.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Corporations are legal entities, not humans. "Decency" is not a legal term, it has no meaning in the context of a legal entity.
If you, as a person, pay your cleaning staff poorly, people knowing this may think lowly of you, and as a human, you may therefore feel a lack of decency.
But a legal entity has no feelings, and thus no decency.