5 ms·

Chumby's Chinese Factories (read previous posts too)

57 points by joshwa 17y ago

poutine 17y ago
Right now as the article explains it's cheaper to use humna labour to do many manufacturing tasks, especially for low volume orders. What I find interesting to think about is the cross over point where it does actually become cheaper to use machines for most or all manufacturing. I think this is all but inevitable. What happens to a country like China when this occurs?
- Shamiq 17y ago
  They start making those machines? Or the machines that make the machines? Etc etc.
- HeyLaughingBoy 17y ago
  The same thing that happened to every other industrialized nation: they automate and those people either find other work or starve. How many typists did word processing software automate out of their jobs in the 80's? Easily tens of thousands just here in the US. What are those typists doing now?
- w00pla 17y ago
  China already produces a lot of people with higher skills (design & development, etc...). It is probably going to be fine. African countries should start to worry - the time when the development goes from commodities -> manufacturing -> development to industrialize your country is coming to an end. In most African countries there are no industrial development (taking advantage of low cost labour). The economy is commodities& subsistence farming.
- radu_floricica 17y ago
  The short answer is that it hurts. I still remember the moment I managed to grok this, some 10 years ago. Say some people manage to design machines which can build stuff a whooping 20% cheaper. Because it's an obvious thing to do, you'll have all the factories in the country switch to these machines, and fire a majority of their workforce. Now, on one hand you have a 20% increase in productivity and on the other hand you have 50% unemployment. You don't have greedy capitalists making money: most of the 20% goes to the consumer, thanks to the competitive market. The biggest share of the money probably goes to the machine builders, but they earned them fair and square: they innovated and thanks to them the job can be done better, easier and cheaper. But overall you still have huge unemployment. So what is the answer? The answer is a shift in the workforce away from manual-jobs. Simply put, continuous education. It's a fact of life that almost nobody is truly safe in this day and age. Not programmers, nor prostitutes. We could all have our jobs innovated away from us. But this is only a bad thing for those who let the current job become the sole means of paying for the mortgage.
dailo10 17y ago
I like how he sums it all up: "Thanks to him, chumbys are $2 cheaper which frees up more money for us consumers to spend on $2 coffees at Starbucks."
- staunch 17y ago
  Extra great for me, since I was sipping a $2 Startbucks coffee while reading it...
- brianobush 17y ago
  My prediction that the current savings slowly erode over time as cost of living rises in China. Hopefully, this will allow automation to come into play in production facilities.
  - donaldc 17y ago
    Likely at that point, they'll probably just ship basic assembly off to other countries where the cost of living is still lower...
iheartmemcache 17y ago
Just for a little bit of trivia, Andrew "Bunnie" Huang is the guy who originally cracked X-box while at MIT. The guy is _ridiculously_ smart and I'd recommend reading his blog (it's quite interesting).
patio11 17y ago
Probably the worst legal job available in my town (poor pay, terrible hours, etc etc) is for a factory which makes more cell phone camera lens gaskets than any company in the world. These come off the production line in sheets of a thousand. Your mission, should you choose to accept it: tweezer them off the sheet and onto the waiting chasis. Your quota: a thousand an hour. There is an acceptable rate for misplacement, which I shouldn't tell you: suffice it to say that my region credits its anal-retentive attention to detail with allowing other, lazier Japanese people to take over worldwide automotive industry. They have a waiting list for this job a mile long at the moment (my neck of the woods is hurting in the current economic environment).
Sukotto 17y ago
for those of you, like me, who have no idea what product the original post is talking about, I found the following on boingboing Chumby is an exciting startup that's making a small, WiFi-enabled, squeezable bean-bag computer that is a delight to hack and play with. You can design your own soft enclosure, install your own OS, write your own apps, or just download programs that do everything from play music and video to run your Chumby as an alarm-clock. Chumby's co-father is Andrew "Bunnie" Huang, the hardware-hacker virtuoso who broke the crypto on the Xbox and paved the way for all the Xbox hacks that followed (documented in his extraordinary book Hacking the Xbox). Bunnie is a passionate advocate for hardware hackers and software hackers, and it shows in Chumby's open design. http://boingboing.net/2006/09/11/chumby-chairman-inte.html http://boingboing.net/2006/09/11/chumby-chairman-inte.html
- liquidben 17y ago
  Great info, but I thought that I'd supplement that, noting that they also have the Chumby One, which is a hard shell version without included battery. Mine is placed mainly to stare at as I dumbly eat cereal first thing in the morning http://www.chumby.com/pages/compare http://www.chumby.com/pages/compare And of course the main website is http://www.chumby.com/ http://www.chumby.com/
  - antidaily 17y ago
    I bought a Chumby One for my place and also as xmas gifts for my family. Everyone loves them. It's worth it for the music capabilities alone.
jwhitlark 17y ago
How on earth do you call that skill? He's repeating a small set of steps innumerable times. That's not skill, it's being fast at one thing. We tried treating people like machines in the West a century ago, and over time, it doesn't work worth shit. I thought this article might have been satire, but apparently not...
- grinich 17y ago
  That's not skill, it's being fast at one thing. Being fast at one thing is definitely a skill, if not a talent. http://www.nbcolympics.com/ http://www.nbcolympics.com/
  - jwhitlark 17y ago
    I take your point, however, the whole point of this type of narrow work breakdown is to be able to train someone unskilled to do a small, single task well. In other words, this may be a skill, but you wouldn't consider the worker skilled.
codexon 17y ago
Is no one else a bit skeptical about the quality of the products? Having 1 person eyeball PCB connectors with tweezers doesn't look like good manufacturing and probably prone to shorts. http://bunniestudios.com/blog/images/mic_skill.jpg http://bunniestudios.com/blog/images/mic_skill.jpg I don't know about everyone else, but I would rather pay the extra $0.95 out of a $119.95 chumby.
- blubb 17y ago
  I think you can trust that any quality problems are quickly identified long before any products leave the factory. Read up on the MicroSD failure blog post on the same blog for an interesting story.
- sern 17y ago
  No, because that one person, having placed thousands of connectors, is most likely better at the job than you or anyone you know. Also, these are connectors - it'd be obvious in testing if they didn't work.
  - codexon 17y ago
    Not everything is reliably tested a couple days after manufacturing. many people have had capacitors gone bad right after warranty, and just because the manufacturer wanted to save $2-3 dollars. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague If your suppliers are like this, there is no telling what they will do to cut costs. A cursory test right out of production is not panacea.
    - cma 17y ago
      Hindsight is 20-20.
  - gcb 17y ago
    and since I write some thousand lines of code every day I don't need anyone to review it. Also, I'm writting code for a crucial part of the project, so it would be obvious if it don't work. So no silly unit test or anything.
papersmith 17y ago
One theory as to why China never underwent industrial revolution in the 1700s was the high efficiency of manual labour, which got them stuck in a local maximum. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_level_equilibrium_trap http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_level_equilibrium_trap

57 points by joshwa 17y ago

Right now as the article explains it's cheaper to use humna labour to do many manufacturing tasks, especially for low volume orders. What I find interesting to think about is the cross over point where it does actually become cheaper to use machines for most or all manufacturing. I think this is all but inevitable. What happens to a country like China when this occurs?

Shamiq 17y ago
They start making those machines? Or the machines that make the machines? Etc etc.
HeyLaughingBoy 17y ago
The same thing that happened to every other industrialized nation: they automate and those people either find other work or starve. How many typists did word processing software automate out of their jobs in the 80's? Easily tens of thousands just here in the US. What are those typists doing now?
w00pla 17y ago
China already produces a lot of people with higher skills (design & development, etc...). It is probably going to be fine. African countries should start to worry - the time when the development goes from commodities -> manufacturing -> development to industrialize your country is coming to an end. In most African countries there are no industrial development (taking advantage of low cost labour). The economy is commodities& subsistence farming.
radu_floricica 17y ago
The short answer is that it hurts. I still remember the moment I managed to grok this, some 10 years ago. Say some people manage to design machines which can build stuff a whooping 20% cheaper. Because it's an obvious thing to do, you'll have all the factories in the country switch to these machines, and fire a majority of their workforce. Now, on one hand you have a 20% increase in productivity and on the other hand you have 50% unemployment. You don't have greedy capitalists making money: most of the 20% goes to the consumer, thanks to the competitive market. The biggest share of the money probably goes to the machine builders, but they earned them fair and square: they innovated and thanks to them the job can be done better, easier and cheaper. But overall you still have huge unemployment. So what is the answer? The answer is a shift in the workforce away from manual-jobs. Simply put, continuous education. It's a fact of life that almost nobody is truly safe in this day and age. Not programmers, nor prostitutes. We could all have our jobs innovated away from us. But this is only a bad thing for those who let the current job become the sole means of paying for the mortgage.

dailo10 17y ago

I like how he sums it all up: "Thanks to him, chumbys are $2 cheaper which frees up more money for us consumers to spend on $2 coffees at Starbucks."

staunch 17y ago
Extra great for me, since I was sipping a $2 Startbucks coffee while reading it...
brianobush 17y ago
My prediction that the current savings slowly erode over time as cost of living rises in China. Hopefully, this will allow automation to come into play in production facilities.
- donaldc 17y ago
  Likely at that point, they'll probably just ship basic assembly off to other countries where the cost of living is still lower...

iheartmemcache 17y ago

Just for a little bit of trivia, Andrew "Bunnie" Huang is the guy who originally cracked X-box while at MIT. The guy is _ridiculously_ smart and I'd recommend reading his blog (it's quite interesting).

patio11 17y ago

Probably the worst legal job available in my town (poor pay, terrible hours, etc etc) is for a factory which makes more cell phone camera lens gaskets than any company in the world. These come off the production line in sheets of a thousand. Your mission, should you choose to accept it: tweezer them off the sheet and onto the waiting chasis. Your quota: a thousand an hour. There is an acceptable rate for misplacement, which I shouldn't tell you: suffice it to say that my region credits its anal-retentive attention to detail with allowing other, lazier Japanese people to take over worldwide automotive industry. They have a waiting list for this job a mile long at the moment (my neck of the woods is hurting in the current economic environment).

Sukotto 17y ago

for those of you, like me, who have no idea what product the original post is talking about, I found the following on boingboing Chumby is an exciting startup that's making a small, WiFi-enabled, squeezable bean-bag computer that is a delight to hack and play with. You can design your own soft enclosure, install your own OS, write your own apps, or just download programs that do everything from play music and video to run your Chumby as an alarm-clock. Chumby's co-father is Andrew "Bunnie" Huang, the hardware-hacker virtuoso who broke the crypto on the Xbox and paved the way for all the Xbox hacks that followed (documented in his extraordinary book Hacking the Xbox). Bunnie is a passionate advocate for hardware hackers and software hackers, and it shows in Chumby's open design. http://boingboing.net/2006/09/11/chumby-chairman-inte.html http://boingboing.net/2006/09/11/chumby-chairman-inte.html

liquidben 17y ago
Great info, but I thought that I'd supplement that, noting that they also have the Chumby One, which is a hard shell version without included battery. Mine is placed mainly to stare at as I dumbly eat cereal first thing in the morning http://www.chumby.com/pages/compare http://www.chumby.com/pages/compare And of course the main website is http://www.chumby.com/ http://www.chumby.com/
- antidaily 17y ago
  I bought a Chumby One for my place and also as xmas gifts for my family. Everyone loves them. It's worth it for the music capabilities alone.

jwhitlark 17y ago

How on earth do you call that skill? He's repeating a small set of steps innumerable times. That's not skill, it's being fast at one thing. We tried treating people like machines in the West a century ago, and over time, it doesn't work worth shit. I thought this article might have been satire, but apparently not...

grinich 17y ago
That's not skill, it's being fast at one thing. Being fast at one thing is definitely a skill, if not a talent. http://www.nbcolympics.com/ http://www.nbcolympics.com/
- jwhitlark 17y ago
  I take your point, however, the whole point of this type of narrow work breakdown is to be able to train someone unskilled to do a small, single task well. In other words, this may be a skill, but you wouldn't consider the worker skilled.

codexon 17y ago

Is no one else a bit skeptical about the quality of the products? Having 1 person eyeball PCB connectors with tweezers doesn't look like good manufacturing and probably prone to shorts. http://bunniestudios.com/blog/images/mic_skill.jpg http://bunniestudios.com/blog/images/mic_skill.jpg I don't know about everyone else, but I would rather pay the extra $0.95 out of a $119.95 chumby.

blubb 17y ago
I think you can trust that any quality problems are quickly identified long before any products leave the factory. Read up on the MicroSD failure blog post on the same blog for an interesting story.
sern 17y ago
No, because that one person, having placed thousands of connectors, is most likely better at the job than you or anyone you know. Also, these are connectors - it'd be obvious in testing if they didn't work.
- codexon 17y ago
  Not everything is reliably tested a couple days after manufacturing. many people have had capacitors gone bad right after warranty, and just because the manufacturer wanted to save $2-3 dollars. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague If your suppliers are like this, there is no telling what they will do to cut costs. A cursory test right out of production is not panacea.
  - cma 17y ago
    Hindsight is 20-20.
- gcb 17y ago
  and since I write some thousand lines of code every day I don't need anyone to review it. Also, I'm writting code for a crucial part of the project, so it would be obvious if it don't work. So no silly unit test or anything.

papersmith 17y ago

One theory as to why China never underwent industrial revolution in the 1700s was the high efficiency of manual labour, which got them stuck in a local maximum. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_level_equilibrium_trap http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_level_equilibrium_trap