4 ms·

Sorry, but how is this capability measured? And why is it being assumed here that labor laws need to be suppressed to make iphone production viable?

lotsofpulp 4y ago
I feel like a rough measure would be to see the proportion of anything that is not clothing that has “Made in India” written on it in one’s home, compared to “Made in China”.
jsnell 4y ago
It seems fair to assume that actual output and manufacturing capability are closely correlated (there's a limit to how much unused capacity can get built). Here's the manufacturing output by country (data from World Bank): https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NV.IND.MANF.CD?most_recent_value_desc=true https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NV.IND.MANF.CD?most_rec... China is at about $5 trillion, India about $450 billion. So it's not 5%, but we are still talking of an order of magnitude.
- mikymoothrowa 4y ago
  This is plain circular reasoning. You’re complaining that india doesn’t have the manufacturing capability by pointing to the fact that stuff is not manufactured in India, in a thread that talks about manufacturing moving to India. You realistically don’t have a way to measure capability.
  - jsnell 4y ago
    First, I'm not complaining about anything. I do not give a fuck about whether India manufactures stuff or not. But there was a question about a number, I provided an answer for how it could be derived. You're welcome! I disagree with your objection. Actual current output is a great proxy for actual current manufacturing capability, assuming even a tiny bit of rationality. If the two are not linked like you imply - and in fact India already has as much capacity as China - then somebody built 10x more factories than they needed, and lost unimaginable amounts of money doing so. Is that what you're suggesting happened? Now, the claim is not that the factories, supply chains, trained workforce, etc could not eventually scale to the same size in India as in China. But somebody actually needs to do that work. Until it is done, the capability possibly does not in exist.
    - mikymoothrowa 4y ago
      one only needs to look at the cement/steel production vs capacity to understand that they’re not the same.

lotsofpulp 4y ago

I feel like a rough measure would be to see the proportion of anything that is not clothing that has “Made in India” written on it in one’s home, compared to “Made in China”.

jsnell 4y ago

It seems fair to assume that actual output and manufacturing capability are closely correlated (there's a limit to how much unused capacity can get built). Here's the manufacturing output by country (data from World Bank): https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NV.IND.MANF.CD?most_recent_value_desc=true https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NV.IND.MANF.CD?most_rec... China is at about $5 trillion, India about $450 billion. So it's not 5%, but we are still talking of an order of magnitude.

mikymoothrowa 4y ago
This is plain circular reasoning. You’re complaining that india doesn’t have the manufacturing capability by pointing to the fact that stuff is not manufactured in India, in a thread that talks about manufacturing moving to India. You realistically don’t have a way to measure capability.
- jsnell 4y ago
  First, I'm not complaining about anything. I do not give a fuck about whether India manufactures stuff or not. But there was a question about a number, I provided an answer for how it could be derived. You're welcome! I disagree with your objection. Actual current output is a great proxy for actual current manufacturing capability, assuming even a tiny bit of rationality. If the two are not linked like you imply - and in fact India already has as much capacity as China - then somebody built 10x more factories than they needed, and lost unimaginable amounts of money doing so. Is that what you're suggesting happened? Now, the claim is not that the factories, supply chains, trained workforce, etc could not eventually scale to the same size in India as in China. But somebody actually needs to do that work. Until it is done, the capability possibly does not in exist.
  - mikymoothrowa 4y ago
    one only needs to look at the cement/steel production vs capacity to understand that they’re not the same.