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4. The Human Element of Food Manufacturing Basically in China human manufacturing rules over all. Many westerners have misconceptions about automation in facto

4. The Human Element of Food Manufacturing Basically in China human manufacturing rules over all. Many westerners have misconceptions about automation in factories. Those fancy iPhone XR's? Assembled by Hand in China (with mechanical assistance) but still, assembled by Hand by real people. China has way too high population for automation. If you call to build a factory, there will be millions of people wanting jobs. These jobs are not good jobs and are labour intensive, but the desire for jobs outweighs any other concern.

jcims 8y ago
I often wonder about the short term impact of efforts to drive employment conditions and pay of these jobs to more 'western' standards. What happens when a factory is built on the edge of a small town and the starting salary and working conditions are better than 75% of the jobs in the region? I'm sure there's a 'rising tide raises all ships' element and the long term effects would have to be beneficial. But in the short term i wonder if there's a labor drain/golden handcuffs effect.
- swiley 8y ago
  It's the same as what happens in the US. Eventually something happens to the factory and everyone turns to drugs and prostitution.
kareemm 8y ago
I was struck by this when I went to visit Shanghai in 2002. I was sitting beside a recent MBA grad who was originally from China. We got to talking. At one point in the conversation he asked me a hypothetical question about how I would design a system to determine traffic conditions. I responded with an answer laying out cameras at intersections and software to make sense of the video. He responded that in China they’d just put a person at every intersection who would send a text message to a team of humans who would update a webpage. It drove home the point to me that labour was so abundant and cheap there that you could often throw more bodies at the problem instead of writinf software... and probably solve the problem better.
- fouc 8y ago
  It's an open secret that AI startups in Silicon Valley are using human labor initially to mimic the AI component. There's still a lot of room for automation with human labor.
  - azurezyq 8y ago
    I have a friend who's running an ads optimization startup. His words: "We are an artificial intelligence company, in which "artificial" comes first and "intelligence" comes second... He's running two divisions, one employs experienced "ads buyers", one tries to tune models to catch up with the former. :P
- starky 8y ago
  China is interesting from this respect, there are so many people, and it is in the government's best interest to keep the citizens employed and happy and therefore there is a lot of "useless" jobs like the one you mention. The first time I visited I was shocked at the number of people employed to man the tollbooths and the number of people working in every restaurant until I realized why.
  - reaperducer 8y ago
    it is in the government's best interest to keep the citizens employed and happy and therefore there is a lot of "useless" jobs like the one you mention. What is useless to one man is a lifeline to another. I saw a documentary on NHK, and one of the points it made is that there are millions and millions and millions of people in China who need a job — any job — just to put food on the table. These are people who are so poor and poorly educated that they don't even know how to write their own names. Signatures are done with a fingerprint in red ink. This one guy was so very happy to be employed full-time clearing sidewalks. With a broom made of twigs during the warm months, and with the same broom made of twigs to slowly clear deep snow in the cold months. But he was employed, by an organization that will pay him regularly and won't cheat him on his wages. So he's grateful to be better off than most of the other people he knows.
teacpde 8y ago
Cheap labor is the same reason why many businesses boom in China but not so much in US/Europe. Take food delivery for example, $10 worth of food costs $1 delivery fee in China while it costs $7 to deliver on ubereats here in the US.
- akvadrako 8y ago
  Well yes, but the food also costs about $2 in China vs $15 in the US.
  - TangoTrotFox 8y ago
    A lot of that also comes down to labor costs. It's easy to forget how much of a chain there is in any product. That fruit you buy at the supermarket has people plant it, grow it, harvest it, clean it, 'package'/label it, transport it, stock it, sell it, bag it. And at each step along the line there are often numerous business to business, administrative, and other costs that need to be covered. And of course there tends to be a thousand different government rules, regulations, fees, and other costs involved along the line. Cheap labor also makes it much easier for independent businesses to open, which helps increase competition and keep prices low. In the US the fees you have to pay just to try to start a business would be more than enough to pay for months for labor. In the US you'll rarely find a middle class neighbor owning a business with a retail front, whereas in many parts of Asia it's quite common: low costs, though low profit. Something I love, and hate, about Asia in general is you can walk into a store and suddenly you'll have half a dozen employees circling about trying to help. Since labor costs don't kill companies, they tend to be much less concerned about running on the bare minimum skeleton crew to keep things chugging along, and I think that's good for everybody. On the other hand that also has the dark side of the out of sight conditions that plague the bottom tier of employees. There's a give and take to all decisions.
- odiroot 8y ago
  I have limited experience but I doubt it's even as high as $1.
  - 8y ago
quotemstr 8y ago
I worry about the extent to which too-cheap labor night slow the development of labor-saving technology. It's ultimately this technology that improves per-capita productivity and keeps us ahead of Malthus. In an environment where you can throw bodies at problems, why bother with more-expensive automation?
- fosk 8y ago
  Some people say that The Roman Empire - had it lasted without any Dark Age - could have given us mobile phones 1000 years ago. Some others say that it wouldn’t have happened, because they had too many slaves and cheap (or free) labor disincentivized optimizations and technology investments.
scurvy 8y ago
Not just automation, but some industrialization, too. I was shocked to watch them build railroads, essentially by hand. One Dutch guy was working the surveying tools, and a translator stood next to him, shouting out the orders. What appeared to be about 30 people straddling railroad rails, lifted up the rails using wood and strap lifts. Hard to explain, but they basically just used a whole lot of people to lay rails. I asked our fixer what the story was, and it was similar to what's written here. If you want to use a machine, you have to buy the machine from the US. That's expensive, and people in China are cheap. Then you have to pay someone to run the machine, and that person costs 20x what the cheap labor does. Then when the machine breaks, you can't get anything done (and you have to pay someone even more expensive to fix it). When the cheap labor can no longer work, you just replace...them. He said that the large companies got paid rebates for each person they hired (or something to that effect). It happens in tech, too. Not much in the way of build automation, but lots of people running around datacenters with DVD's and USB sticks. In short, it keeps people busy and lessens the chance of uprisings (which is a thing in China).
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- vfulco2 8y ago
  Fascinating the first image that pops into my mind is the building of US railroads and what a bad rap American business owners get for using slave labor. I don't know much about the period but wonder if one man's slave laborer is another man's very low wage but grateful laborer.
seanmcdirmid 8y ago
> If you call to build a factory, there will be millions of people wanting jobs. These jobs are not good jobs and are labour intensive, but the desire for jobs outweighs any other concern. China actually has labor shortages in certain places at certain times, yes, even for those factories. Also, wages have been going up, meaning labor is getting more expensive as surpluses are tapped out. It isn’t infinite, especially in 2018 compared to 1998. Add on to that china’s coming demographic cliff, and automation is obviously going to have to make up the difference.
- barkingcat 8y ago
  This is a very western oriented viewpoint. If it comes to that, the Chinese solution is not automation. It's to allow more marriages and have more children. Revise the now defunct childbirth policy to lean the other way (ie social program to have more kids) and China can have a fertility spurt that can increase the size of the country by two or three US's in 2 generations. There's the labour to take care of the demographic cliff. They can also be ready work in healthcare to take care of the aging population in about 15-18 years. Voila.
cgdcraig 8y ago
Humans are the most flexible and reconfigurable system for assembly. They can identify and deal with near infinite variations in position and condition of your inputs. If you look at automated assembly like 3/4 of the automation is to make sure the robot has the pieces is in the right place or orientation and the movements that are used are not complicated. Meanwhile for a human you can toss a bag of parts and they'll just fish through the bag or reoriented whatever as needed. Put a piece sideways into a machine that wasn't made to deal with it and it'll just flip out. Also reconfiguring assembly lines on the fly is feasible, change what the line is doing could be as easy as workers grabbing a different tool box. Fixed assembly lines are only good at scale and if the product will change incredibly slowly.
Camillo 8y ago
> Basically in China human manufacturing rules over all. Many westerners have misconceptions about automation in factories. Many westerners are unhappy because globalization has caused a loss of manufacturing jobs. People elsewhere in the thread say that the Chinese government encourages using a lot of human labor in order to foster social order. Maybe so, or maybe they don't need to, because labor is so cheap anyway. Certainly the Japanese government does it, since labor is not cheap there. But Western governments are more efficient. They don't have to make sure people have jobs: they can just tell people that those jobs went away because of automation, not globalization. People won't complain too much, they know they can't fight technology. And that's where the misconception comes from. Basically in the West labor arbitrage rules over all.

jcims 8y ago

I often wonder about the short term impact of efforts to drive employment conditions and pay of these jobs to more 'western' standards. What happens when a factory is built on the edge of a small town and the starting salary and working conditions are better than 75% of the jobs in the region? I'm sure there's a 'rising tide raises all ships' element and the long term effects would have to be beneficial. But in the short term i wonder if there's a labor drain/golden handcuffs effect.

swiley 8y ago
It's the same as what happens in the US. Eventually something happens to the factory and everyone turns to drugs and prostitution.

kareemm 8y ago

I was struck by this when I went to visit Shanghai in 2002. I was sitting beside a recent MBA grad who was originally from China. We got to talking. At one point in the conversation he asked me a hypothetical question about how I would design a system to determine traffic conditions. I responded with an answer laying out cameras at intersections and software to make sense of the video. He responded that in China they’d just put a person at every intersection who would send a text message to a team of humans who would update a webpage. It drove home the point to me that labour was so abundant and cheap there that you could often throw more bodies at the problem instead of writinf software... and probably solve the problem better.

fouc 8y ago
It's an open secret that AI startups in Silicon Valley are using human labor initially to mimic the AI component. There's still a lot of room for automation with human labor.
- azurezyq 8y ago
  I have a friend who's running an ads optimization startup. His words: "We are an artificial intelligence company, in which "artificial" comes first and "intelligence" comes second... He's running two divisions, one employs experienced "ads buyers", one tries to tune models to catch up with the former. :P
starky 8y ago
China is interesting from this respect, there are so many people, and it is in the government's best interest to keep the citizens employed and happy and therefore there is a lot of "useless" jobs like the one you mention. The first time I visited I was shocked at the number of people employed to man the tollbooths and the number of people working in every restaurant until I realized why.
- reaperducer 8y ago
  it is in the government's best interest to keep the citizens employed and happy and therefore there is a lot of "useless" jobs like the one you mention. What is useless to one man is a lifeline to another. I saw a documentary on NHK, and one of the points it made is that there are millions and millions and millions of people in China who need a job — any job — just to put food on the table. These are people who are so poor and poorly educated that they don't even know how to write their own names. Signatures are done with a fingerprint in red ink. This one guy was so very happy to be employed full-time clearing sidewalks. With a broom made of twigs during the warm months, and with the same broom made of twigs to slowly clear deep snow in the cold months. But he was employed, by an organization that will pay him regularly and won't cheat him on his wages. So he's grateful to be better off than most of the other people he knows.

teacpde 8y ago

Cheap labor is the same reason why many businesses boom in China but not so much in US/Europe. Take food delivery for example, $10 worth of food costs $1 delivery fee in China while it costs $7 to deliver on ubereats here in the US.

akvadrako 8y ago
Well yes, but the food also costs about $2 in China vs $15 in the US.
- TangoTrotFox 8y ago
  A lot of that also comes down to labor costs. It's easy to forget how much of a chain there is in any product. That fruit you buy at the supermarket has people plant it, grow it, harvest it, clean it, 'package'/label it, transport it, stock it, sell it, bag it. And at each step along the line there are often numerous business to business, administrative, and other costs that need to be covered. And of course there tends to be a thousand different government rules, regulations, fees, and other costs involved along the line. Cheap labor also makes it much easier for independent businesses to open, which helps increase competition and keep prices low. In the US the fees you have to pay just to try to start a business would be more than enough to pay for months for labor. In the US you'll rarely find a middle class neighbor owning a business with a retail front, whereas in many parts of Asia it's quite common: low costs, though low profit. Something I love, and hate, about Asia in general is you can walk into a store and suddenly you'll have half a dozen employees circling about trying to help. Since labor costs don't kill companies, they tend to be much less concerned about running on the bare minimum skeleton crew to keep things chugging along, and I think that's good for everybody. On the other hand that also has the dark side of the out of sight conditions that plague the bottom tier of employees. There's a give and take to all decisions.
odiroot 8y ago
I have limited experience but I doubt it's even as high as $1.
- 8y ago

quotemstr 8y ago

I worry about the extent to which too-cheap labor night slow the development of labor-saving technology. It's ultimately this technology that improves per-capita productivity and keeps us ahead of Malthus. In an environment where you can throw bodies at problems, why bother with more-expensive automation?

fosk 8y ago
Some people say that The Roman Empire - had it lasted without any Dark Age - could have given us mobile phones 1000 years ago. Some others say that it wouldn’t have happened, because they had too many slaves and cheap (or free) labor disincentivized optimizations and technology investments.

scurvy 8y ago

Not just automation, but some industrialization, too. I was shocked to watch them build railroads, essentially by hand. One Dutch guy was working the surveying tools, and a translator stood next to him, shouting out the orders. What appeared to be about 30 people straddling railroad rails, lifted up the rails using wood and strap lifts. Hard to explain, but they basically just used a whole lot of people to lay rails. I asked our fixer what the story was, and it was similar to what's written here. If you want to use a machine, you have to buy the machine from the US. That's expensive, and people in China are cheap. Then you have to pay someone to run the machine, and that person costs 20x what the cheap labor does. Then when the machine breaks, you can't get anything done (and you have to pay someone even more expensive to fix it). When the cheap labor can no longer work, you just replace...them. He said that the large companies got paid rebates for each person they hired (or something to that effect). It happens in tech, too. Not much in the way of build automation, but lots of people running around datacenters with DVD's and USB sticks. In short, it keeps people busy and lessens the chance of uprisings (which is a thing in China).

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
vfulco2 8y ago
Fascinating the first image that pops into my mind is the building of US railroads and what a bad rap American business owners get for using slave labor. I don't know much about the period but wonder if one man's slave laborer is another man's very low wage but grateful laborer.

seanmcdirmid 8y ago

> If you call to build a factory, there will be millions of people wanting jobs. These jobs are not good jobs and are labour intensive, but the desire for jobs outweighs any other concern. China actually has labor shortages in certain places at certain times, yes, even for those factories. Also, wages have been going up, meaning labor is getting more expensive as surpluses are tapped out. It isn’t infinite, especially in 2018 compared to 1998. Add on to that china’s coming demographic cliff, and automation is obviously going to have to make up the difference.

barkingcat 8y ago
This is a very western oriented viewpoint. If it comes to that, the Chinese solution is not automation. It's to allow more marriages and have more children. Revise the now defunct childbirth policy to lean the other way (ie social program to have more kids) and China can have a fertility spurt that can increase the size of the country by two or three US's in 2 generations. There's the labour to take care of the demographic cliff. They can also be ready work in healthcare to take care of the aging population in about 15-18 years. Voila.

cgdcraig 8y ago

Humans are the most flexible and reconfigurable system for assembly. They can identify and deal with near infinite variations in position and condition of your inputs. If you look at automated assembly like 3/4 of the automation is to make sure the robot has the pieces is in the right place or orientation and the movements that are used are not complicated. Meanwhile for a human you can toss a bag of parts and they'll just fish through the bag or reoriented whatever as needed. Put a piece sideways into a machine that wasn't made to deal with it and it'll just flip out. Also reconfiguring assembly lines on the fly is feasible, change what the line is doing could be as easy as workers grabbing a different tool box. Fixed assembly lines are only good at scale and if the product will change incredibly slowly.

Camillo 8y ago

> Basically in China human manufacturing rules over all. Many westerners have misconceptions about automation in factories. Many westerners are unhappy because globalization has caused a loss of manufacturing jobs. People elsewhere in the thread say that the Chinese government encourages using a lot of human labor in order to foster social order. Maybe so, or maybe they don't need to, because labor is so cheap anyway. Certainly the Japanese government does it, since labor is not cheap there. But Western governments are more efficient. They don't have to make sure people have jobs: they can just tell people that those jobs went away because of automation, not globalization. People won't complain too much, they know they can't fight technology. And that's where the misconception comes from. Basically in the West labor arbitrage rules over all.