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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".
Cause out of work factory workers sure aren't going to be buying them.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
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?
According to press coverage in Germany the main advantage (apart from not having to pay human workers) they are after is not so much storage and transport cost (they are pretty cheap these days), but eliminating the time it takes to ship products from China to the countries where they are sold. "Fashions" seem to come and go within months these days, and a shipment taking a month can make a difference, then.
"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
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 think the global issue of diminishing work due to replacement by robots will more likely be solved when production and consumption happen in the same country, so politicians can see "both sides of the medal" - cause and effect. Producing in country A and selling in country B on the contrary makes it less likely the problems of unemployment are solved.
You raise a very interesting point about onshoring manufacturing, although you didn't specifically say it: quality.
With robotic production, production quality can become almost a constant. So what differentiates a good made in Country A vs. Country B? We could go for tariff protections, but I hate the idea of rent-seeking governments inserting themselves into transactions merely to soak up money. The quality of the good is ultimately going to be determined by the precision of the robot; meaning how well maintained is that machine (bearing, sensors, hydraulics etc).
So the competitive advantage is going to go to the countries who are investing in training (essentially) mechanics. I don't think drag'n'drop programmers (see another /. story) are going to cut it in that world...
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.
Adidas's GROSS profits are increasing. "Gross Profit" is total revenue--sales. Outside of the financial industry, "Gross Profit" is a weasel-word used to mislead people: we usually think of "profit" as "net profit," which is the gross profit minus operating expenses. This makes sense because operating expenses include wages (employee gross profits--net is minus taxes), supply line (other business's gross profits), and outsourced business services (again, other business's gross profits). If you put all business net profits together with all employee gross income, you get the total income.
Gross profits increase if your employee wages get more expensive and you thus adjust the price of your product. Your net profit can actually decrease under this situation, leaving your business with less money at the end of the year.
As for this:
I would love to know why Adidas can't afford to pay decent wages?
Businesses don't pay wages. Consumers pay wages.
Wages in aggregate across the entire production process are the base cost: at the end of the day, the product will absolutely sell for no less expensive than that. Volume deals push the price closer to the cost, such as when GM tries to bid for 100,000,000 tonnes of steel per year, and the steel mills contract with the coal and ore companies contingent on winning the GM contract, and everyone slims their profit margin because taking $1 per tonne on 100,000,000 tonnes is still $100,000,000 versus trying to profit $20 per tonne and selling 0 tonnes to GM. No matter how hard you compact that down--get it down to tenths of a cent per unit and 0.1% profit margins--you'll get no lower than the wage-labor costs of all employees involved in the entire supply chain.
Raise the wage-labor cost such that the steel costs $20 more per tonne and the price the steel mill will need to charge goes up by $20. With GM making passenger cars weighing 1.5 tonnes in steel, those cars cost $30 more. Either GM absorbs the cost in the form of lower profit margins (in which case, GM, as the consumer of steel, pays the wage of the steel mill) or GM holds its profit margin (usually 7%-13%; was -7.5% in 2013--they took a loss, which the big profit margins help protect against) and the end consumer pays for the wage raise.
In the case of Adidas, when shoe-maker labor increases, they can either raise prices or lower profits. Adidas's profits barely offset their loss years, with a five-year average of 4% and a five-year low of -7.5%. That means a 4% increase in labor costs--29 cents in minimum-wage increase in the United States, or a 14 cents increase on $3.50/hr Chinese labor--can put Adidas into permanent loss, ending in bankruptcy.
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Many Years ago I read a sifi novel about a planet with unlimited energy reserves and through the miracle of Sifi, the ability to fabricate anything. In the novel they had no concept of money. Everyone was able to choose their vocation, which they did out of altruism, or at least, a desire to not be seen as a free loader.
Start trek alludes to a no money society, but the various series are cluttered with Capitalistic enterprises (Ha!) and other examples.
Assuming that one day there is essentially no scarcity of essential materials (food, clothing, shelter, etc.), what structure do you believe a society would take?
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.