5 ms·

James Dyson reinvented the vacuum. Now he wants to remake the economy

48 points by awk 15y ago

jobeirne 15y ago
> But Mr. Dyson describes it as only one symptom of a larger problem: a Western world, especially the former branches of the British Empire such as Britain and Canada, that has lost its will to invent and make things. Excuse me? Apple's pushing the limit of display technology by using layered pixels. Google has invented and is maintaining an index on the sum of the world's knowledge. Facebook and Twitter have invented contraptions that make information dispersal nearly frictionless. And this guy says the Western world has lost its will to invent and make things?
- mvzink 15y ago
  "invent and make things" may make it sound differently, but this article is purely about manufacture of physical goods. Facebook, Twitter, and Google are considered service providers, not manufacturers, in this situation. Apple is the perfect example of what Dyson is talking about though: those cool layered pixel displays are manufactured primarily in Southeast Asia by LG, Sharp, and Samsung. Dyson would be lamenting that they aren't produced in the USA, he isn't saying they aren't being invented in the USA.
- click170 15y ago
  I think he means physical things, but your correct about technological innovation still taking place. They aren't (or don't have to be) mutually exclusive though, he has a point.
Uchikoma 15y ago
After using a Dyson vacuum cleaner (DC08 Animal) for some years, I now think I've fallen for marketing, the cleaner isn't a very good one and I'd never buy one again from Dyson. Dyson is a lot of marketing, not so much product. I like the hand dryers though.
- jbronn 15y ago
  You're not alone -- in the latest Consumer Reports the Dyson vacuums got some of the worst reviews.
  - ironchef 15y ago
    Odd. The DC28 (Animal) when i bought it (5 or 6 years ago) was rated a very good (and is still kicking VERY well). I wonder if quality has decreased.
  - Uchikoma 15y ago
    Same here in Germany, Dyson vacuums get middle to low scores in all reviews, mostly for suction power, they are very bad at it.
- learc83 15y ago
  I've had a DC24 for the last 2 years, and I love it. The Lots of attention to detail, like how easy it is to get to parts like the roller so you can clean it. It's also really easy to empty, and the ball design does make it easier to maneuver.
  - Uchikoma 15y ago
    What I do like about the DC08 is how it handles, it's easy. The major downside it has not enough power. Other vacuum cleaners get more suction power out of the electric power, and contrary to Dyson marketing, do not get worse. The DC08 might not go down in suction power of time, but it's not great to start.
- macco 15y ago
  Yeah, Dyson is the Apple of home appliances. Vaccums without bags don't make any sense. Don't get me wrong, both companies are very impressing and they make their customers happy, but usually they don't have the best hardware of their industry.
  - Nogwater 15y ago
shingen 15y ago
The west definitely needs to get back to manufacturing. You get rich making things, and poor buying them. Robots will, in the next few decades, wipe out all the labor benefit that China has. Their huge population base value will shift to being a huge liability. Bring 5 million manufacturing jobs back to America through 100 million robots (that never riot, demand wage increases, unionize, go on vacation, can work 24/7, and get better constantly), and the cheap labor advantage that China has completely disappears. The only question is who will dominate robotic manufacturing, not whether it'll happen. http://www.heartlandrobotics.com/ http://www.heartlandrobotics.com/
- DanBC 15y ago
  Industrial robots exist today. Look at, for example, pick and place machines used in electronic manufacturing. Look at this teeny tiny little pick and place machine. ( It can place 500 components a minute.) (http://www.acrosemi.com/eng_samsung_SM411.htm http://www.acrosemi.com/eng_samsung_SM411.htm) Or at this slightly bigger setup: (http://www.acrosemi.com/eng_samsung_fulllineSMT.htm http://www.acrosemi.com/eng_samsung_fulllineSMT.htm) These still need staff to run. You need staff to program the machines; you need staff to load components; you need staff to move the product around; you need staff to maintain the machines. And then you need staff to do the things that your robots can't yet do. I have no idea how much someone would get paid for that in US, but I know it's a lot less in Poland / India / China / etc.
  - ssmoot 15y ago
    About $12/hr. I did that once upon a time as a temporary job in San Antonio. Or maybe it was Austin. I forget the name of the company, but it was mostly small-batch PCBs carrying a hefty price tag. Throughput was probably 1 board a minute if you include loading, screening, letting the machine do it's thing, moving to the baking machine (I forget the name, but you know, the conveyor oven thing that melts the solder) and passing along to the test/QA benches. I think these were mostly for Telecom vendors, but it was just small batch PCB production for hire stuff. I've got to believe the labor costs were a small fraction of the overall business costs. Just one component could be $50, so the inevitable loss of the occasional part, or a PCB that didn't pass QA would cost 10X more than the labor costs for the entire hour it was produced in.
cdvonstinkpot 15y ago
This excerpt mentions a trend I'd rather not see come to fruition: "...the sort of policies proposed by the Dysons of the world amount to the beginning of a levelling-down of Western standards to developing-world levels, when the opposite should be occurring." I would hope that the leaders of our country don't feel the need to lessen our standards on working conditions in the name of economic recovery. I think that would be backward progress. Another excerpt caught my attention: "After all, it was the financial-services and property sectors that collapsed; industry-driven economies such as Germany and Singapore experienced record-breaking export booms and avoided the crisis." With that in mind it would seem then that our current troubles are due to many of our economy's eggs being in one basket, so-to-speak. It doesn't seem such an attractive idea to make a U-turn back toward making manufacturing our strong point- it seems to me we have a better chance building on what seems to be a strong foundation in technology, to make that our strong point, and then re-invest in manufacturing only to a degree enough to have a safe amount of diversification in our economy. I've read lately somewhere about a trend in 'high-tech' manufacturing, which seems like the kind of industry that would maintain high(er) growth levels.
- lukeschlather 15y ago
  It seems strange to mention Germany when arguing for creating a "worse is better" job market. Germany has focused on creating high-quality engineering jobs and giving them to high-quality engineers. Dyson seems to be arguing that the government should create low-quality engineering jobs that CEOs can create and get rid of as fast as they can spin an EC2 instance up and down. That's certainly great from the CEO's point of view, but from the perspective of the worker that is in and out of a job before he can buy a month's worth of groceries, it's kind of terrifying.
  - drucken 15y ago
    Agreed, lukeschlather. THIS is the key point. The reason why Germany, Singapore and other strong manufacturing-based developed countries have succeded so well is NOT because they have taken the worst elements of Anglo-Saxon capitalism and added back a few factories! These countries have long had a strong, focus on engineering from education through to supply-chain all the way to elite managers, executives and corporate governance. For example, in the Germanic countries, long-term stakeholders (such as family founders and employee unions) exist and are powerful. This reduces the impact of the flighty capital and short-termist control from mere free-standing shareholders (this includes the share-compensated manager class and private equity companies). This is important because it is the abililty of a company to continually invest in its long-term interests that enables them to keep several steps ahead of the purely labor-intensive efforts from new entrants such as from China or South America. Combined with the success of the Mittelstand (Small and Medium Enterprises or SME's in Anglo-speak), the result is that German companies make high quality widgets and whole products that are in great demand the world over and to all intents and purposes irreplaceable. In addition, it is culturally and financially highly acceptable to be considered an engineer in those countries. Even their debt-sparse financial system encourages business which are only viable if they are able to create cash upfront, which is considerably easier for a well-run, long-term managed manufacturing business rather than many service companies.
DonnyV 15y ago
The one thing no one ever talks about when they speak of manufacturering coming back is the pollution that comes with it. We didn't just out source manufacturering we also out sourced the pollution. How will we deal with that?
- morsch 15y ago
  I guess investing into cleaner manufacturing technology would be a start. There'd be a much bigger incentive to do that in another country, or in a China that actually enforced its own laws.
wallflower 15y ago
> Dyson played a large part in the election of Mr. Cameron's government: He wrote a report, “Innovative Britain,” calling for tax and education systems designed to move people into design and manufacturing; it was a major subject of the 2010 election, and almost all of its recommendations have been implemented. Too large to summarize. The report, in whole, might be worth skimming. > Both Professor Holman and David Phillips, Emeritus Professor at Imperial College believe that without the stimulation produced by making elements combust and fizz, pupils won’t continue science beyond GCSEs. “All the evidence points to practical work being the thing that pupils like to do,” Prof Holman said. “This isn’t about how do you get more Grade Cs in GCSEs, it’s about how you inspire more young people.” "Ingenious Britain" http://media.dyson.com/images_resize_sites/inside_dyson/assets/UK/downloads/IngeniousBritain.PDF http://media.dyson.com/images_resize_sites/inside_dyson/asse...
peteretep 15y ago
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/02/22/manufacturing_figures/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/02/22/manufacturing_figure... -- seems relevant
- drucken 15y ago
  A poor article based on a very selective and introspective graph. 1. The graph shows there's been a mere 25% increase in manufacturing output value since the 70s. The economic value growth of other sectors has been far greater than that. 2. It does not show the vastly greater growths in manufacturing from other developed countries, including the US! 3. How manufacturing behaves in a downturn is very closely related to how the business is managed (i.e. during the boom part of the cycle). If industries or many companies take on large amounts of debt and merely trim costs in the name of efficiencies during booms, instead of optimising for cash, new investments or your best assets, they will suffer in the inevitable downturns, etc. The former practices are common in Anglo-Saxon capitalism. Thus, the implication that manufacturing necessarily is more volatile during a downturn than services is superficial. It may be for the UK up till now, but it does not have to be that way and, even if it were, it may not be enough of an issue. How do you think some of those productivity gains were previously made - low hanging fruit?
nirvana 15y ago
"In fact, Mr. Dyson, Britain's most famous manufacturer, doesn't actually manufacture anything in Britain. He hasn't done so for 10 years, since he was refused local permission to expand his Wiltshire factory" That's it right there. He wasn't allowed to expand his factory. Presumably it was on land he already owned, right? It was an existing factory. He had to get permission to grow the economy by expanding, and that permission was denied. That's the core of it. So long as you need government permission to do anything, and that permission comes from someone who has no incentive to give it, and plenty of incentives to deny it (e.g.: covering their butt) this trend will continue. The british (and US) culture is "you have to get permission before you do anything", and that's a form of regulation that is really harmful to growth. That gives a lot of power to people who can be petty... but it also creates a lot of make work jobs that are politically very valuable (because , you see, donate to the right campaigns and your permission comes very easy. Donate to the wrong person and you have trouble doing anything.) The correct form of regulation is after the fact- if you do something wrong, violate someone's human or property rights, then you are punished. Its not like the permit based system is doing any review (that's the excuse but they rarely are funded well enough to really do this). I remember a friend who lived in central california who wanted to build a house. He was in an earthquake area and as a geologist he mapped out the fault lines and knew the relationship to his property of the nearest fault and thus the specific danger. He had a house designed that would withstand an earthquake on that fault and wanted to build it. He wasn't allowed to do that-- because his design was not the off the shelf slab house design. Liquifation makes slab houses very poor in an earthquake, but that is what the kid in the permit office was able to approve. He was literally forced to build a house that was unsafe to live in, because he couldn't get permits to build a safe one. They had no interest in doing an engineering review (that costs money) or in seeing the work of the engineers he'd hired. It was total joke. His alternative was simply to sell the land and move to another state.... instead he built his house (it was his dream house after all) only on a foundation that he knows will not survive the earthquake.
- masklinn 15y ago
  Not that I want to distract from you going Galt on us, but wikipedia has describes the event slightly differently: > In 2002, the company transferred vacuum cleaner production to Malaysia. Dyson claimed that they requested planning permission to expand the factory to increase vacuum cleaner production, but that this application failed. However, the local government claims that no such permission was ever sought, as the land Dyson planned to use was privately owned and the original owner did not want to sell.[0] > Although nearly 800 manufacturing jobs were lost, Dyson states that the cost savings from transferring production to Malaysia enabled investment in research & development at their Malmesbury head office.[1] And > The correct form of regulation is after the fact- if you do something wrong, violate someone's human or property rights, then you are punished. That's completely nonsensical, there are millions of things which can not be fixed when destroyed, the only way to handle them is to prevent them from being broken in the first place. Post-regulation of razing somebody else's home or of dumping toxic sludge on commons is indefensible. [0] http://www.allbusiness.com/government/government-bodies-offices-regional/12878932-1.html http://www.allbusiness.com/government/government-bodies-offi... [1] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/2282809.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/2282809.stm
JVIDEL 15y ago
It's the chicken and the egg with these guys: we can't get factories because all the components are made elsewhere, and we can't get the components because we have no factories... You can't use trade barriers anymore because if you block someone then you're getting blocked too. At the same time you can't let companies choose between local or abroad else those going to dirt-poor countries will have an unfair competitive edge that may bankrupt the ones that stayed, something that already happened 20 years ago. You know what's the biggest industrial innovation right now? Toyota's new model factory: it's designed to be moved at any time to anywhere in the world, cheap and fast. It has a lower degree of automation than most car factories, why? Because Toyota realized it was easier and cheaper to hire people than to use robots which are still very expensive and need to be reinstalled and reprogrammed each time you move them. That's the future of manufacturing: if X place is cheaper than our current location then we're moving everything there.
iRobot 15y ago
I'm guessing nothing has really changed.. Rasberry pi ?

48 points by awk 15y ago

> But Mr. Dyson describes it as only one symptom of a larger problem: a Western world, especially the former branches of the British Empire such as Britain and Canada, that has lost its will to invent and make things. Excuse me? Apple's pushing the limit of display technology by using layered pixels. Google has invented and is maintaining an index on the sum of the world's knowledge. Facebook and Twitter have invented contraptions that make information dispersal nearly frictionless. And this guy says the Western world has lost its will to invent and make things?

mvzink 15y ago
"invent and make things" may make it sound differently, but this article is purely about manufacture of physical goods. Facebook, Twitter, and Google are considered service providers, not manufacturers, in this situation. Apple is the perfect example of what Dyson is talking about though: those cool layered pixel displays are manufactured primarily in Southeast Asia by LG, Sharp, and Samsung. Dyson would be lamenting that they aren't produced in the USA, he isn't saying they aren't being invented in the USA.
click170 15y ago
I think he means physical things, but your correct about technological innovation still taking place. They aren't (or don't have to be) mutually exclusive though, he has a point.

Uchikoma 15y ago

After using a Dyson vacuum cleaner (DC08 Animal) for some years, I now think I've fallen for marketing, the cleaner isn't a very good one and I'd never buy one again from Dyson. Dyson is a lot of marketing, not so much product. I like the hand dryers though.

jbronn 15y ago
You're not alone -- in the latest Consumer Reports the Dyson vacuums got some of the worst reviews.
- ironchef 15y ago
  Odd. The DC28 (Animal) when i bought it (5 or 6 years ago) was rated a very good (and is still kicking VERY well). I wonder if quality has decreased.
- Uchikoma 15y ago
  Same here in Germany, Dyson vacuums get middle to low scores in all reviews, mostly for suction power, they are very bad at it.
learc83 15y ago
I've had a DC24 for the last 2 years, and I love it. The Lots of attention to detail, like how easy it is to get to parts like the roller so you can clean it. It's also really easy to empty, and the ball design does make it easier to maneuver.
- Uchikoma 15y ago
  What I do like about the DC08 is how it handles, it's easy. The major downside it has not enough power. Other vacuum cleaners get more suction power out of the electric power, and contrary to Dyson marketing, do not get worse. The DC08 might not go down in suction power of time, but it's not great to start.
macco 15y ago
Yeah, Dyson is the Apple of home appliances. Vaccums without bags don't make any sense. Don't get me wrong, both companies are very impressing and they make their customers happy, but usually they don't have the best hardware of their industry.
- Nogwater 15y ago

shingen 15y ago

The west definitely needs to get back to manufacturing. You get rich making things, and poor buying them. Robots will, in the next few decades, wipe out all the labor benefit that China has. Their huge population base value will shift to being a huge liability. Bring 5 million manufacturing jobs back to America through 100 million robots (that never riot, demand wage increases, unionize, go on vacation, can work 24/7, and get better constantly), and the cheap labor advantage that China has completely disappears. The only question is who will dominate robotic manufacturing, not whether it'll happen. http://www.heartlandrobotics.com/ http://www.heartlandrobotics.com/

DanBC 15y ago
Industrial robots exist today. Look at, for example, pick and place machines used in electronic manufacturing. Look at this teeny tiny little pick and place machine. ( It can place 500 components a minute.) (http://www.acrosemi.com/eng_samsung_SM411.htm http://www.acrosemi.com/eng_samsung_SM411.htm) Or at this slightly bigger setup: (http://www.acrosemi.com/eng_samsung_fulllineSMT.htm http://www.acrosemi.com/eng_samsung_fulllineSMT.htm) These still need staff to run. You need staff to program the machines; you need staff to load components; you need staff to move the product around; you need staff to maintain the machines. And then you need staff to do the things that your robots can't yet do. I have no idea how much someone would get paid for that in US, but I know it's a lot less in Poland / India / China / etc.
- ssmoot 15y ago
  About $12/hr. I did that once upon a time as a temporary job in San Antonio. Or maybe it was Austin. I forget the name of the company, but it was mostly small-batch PCBs carrying a hefty price tag. Throughput was probably 1 board a minute if you include loading, screening, letting the machine do it's thing, moving to the baking machine (I forget the name, but you know, the conveyor oven thing that melts the solder) and passing along to the test/QA benches. I think these were mostly for Telecom vendors, but it was just small batch PCB production for hire stuff. I've got to believe the labor costs were a small fraction of the overall business costs. Just one component could be $50, so the inevitable loss of the occasional part, or a PCB that didn't pass QA would cost 10X more than the labor costs for the entire hour it was produced in.

cdvonstinkpot 15y ago

This excerpt mentions a trend I'd rather not see come to fruition: "...the sort of policies proposed by the Dysons of the world amount to the beginning of a levelling-down of Western standards to developing-world levels, when the opposite should be occurring." I would hope that the leaders of our country don't feel the need to lessen our standards on working conditions in the name of economic recovery. I think that would be backward progress. Another excerpt caught my attention: "After all, it was the financial-services and property sectors that collapsed; industry-driven economies such as Germany and Singapore experienced record-breaking export booms and avoided the crisis." With that in mind it would seem then that our current troubles are due to many of our economy's eggs being in one basket, so-to-speak. It doesn't seem such an attractive idea to make a U-turn back toward making manufacturing our strong point- it seems to me we have a better chance building on what seems to be a strong foundation in technology, to make that our strong point, and then re-invest in manufacturing only to a degree enough to have a safe amount of diversification in our economy. I've read lately somewhere about a trend in 'high-tech' manufacturing, which seems like the kind of industry that would maintain high(er) growth levels.

lukeschlather 15y ago
It seems strange to mention Germany when arguing for creating a "worse is better" job market. Germany has focused on creating high-quality engineering jobs and giving them to high-quality engineers. Dyson seems to be arguing that the government should create low-quality engineering jobs that CEOs can create and get rid of as fast as they can spin an EC2 instance up and down. That's certainly great from the CEO's point of view, but from the perspective of the worker that is in and out of a job before he can buy a month's worth of groceries, it's kind of terrifying.
- drucken 15y ago
  Agreed, lukeschlather. THIS is the key point. The reason why Germany, Singapore and other strong manufacturing-based developed countries have succeded so well is NOT because they have taken the worst elements of Anglo-Saxon capitalism and added back a few factories! These countries have long had a strong, focus on engineering from education through to supply-chain all the way to elite managers, executives and corporate governance. For example, in the Germanic countries, long-term stakeholders (such as family founders and employee unions) exist and are powerful. This reduces the impact of the flighty capital and short-termist control from mere free-standing shareholders (this includes the share-compensated manager class and private equity companies). This is important because it is the abililty of a company to continually invest in its long-term interests that enables them to keep several steps ahead of the purely labor-intensive efforts from new entrants such as from China or South America. Combined with the success of the Mittelstand (Small and Medium Enterprises or SME's in Anglo-speak), the result is that German companies make high quality widgets and whole products that are in great demand the world over and to all intents and purposes irreplaceable. In addition, it is culturally and financially highly acceptable to be considered an engineer in those countries. Even their debt-sparse financial system encourages business which are only viable if they are able to create cash upfront, which is considerably easier for a well-run, long-term managed manufacturing business rather than many service companies.

DonnyV 15y ago

The one thing no one ever talks about when they speak of manufacturering coming back is the pollution that comes with it. We didn't just out source manufacturering we also out sourced the pollution. How will we deal with that?

morsch 15y ago
I guess investing into cleaner manufacturing technology would be a start. There'd be a much bigger incentive to do that in another country, or in a China that actually enforced its own laws.

wallflower 15y ago

> Dyson played a large part in the election of Mr. Cameron's government: He wrote a report, “Innovative Britain,” calling for tax and education systems designed to move people into design and manufacturing; it was a major subject of the 2010 election, and almost all of its recommendations have been implemented. Too large to summarize. The report, in whole, might be worth skimming. > Both Professor Holman and David Phillips, Emeritus Professor at Imperial College believe that without the stimulation produced by making elements combust and fizz, pupils won’t continue science beyond GCSEs. “All the evidence points to practical work being the thing that pupils like to do,” Prof Holman said. “This isn’t about how do you get more Grade Cs in GCSEs, it’s about how you inspire more young people.” "Ingenious Britain" http://media.dyson.com/images_resize_sites/inside_dyson/assets/UK/downloads/IngeniousBritain.PDF http://media.dyson.com/images_resize_sites/inside_dyson/asse...

peteretep 15y ago

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/02/22/manufacturing_figures/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/02/22/manufacturing_figure... -- seems relevant

drucken 15y ago
A poor article based on a very selective and introspective graph. 1. The graph shows there's been a mere 25% increase in manufacturing output value since the 70s. The economic value growth of other sectors has been far greater than that. 2. It does not show the vastly greater growths in manufacturing from other developed countries, including the US! 3. How manufacturing behaves in a downturn is very closely related to how the business is managed (i.e. during the boom part of the cycle). If industries or many companies take on large amounts of debt and merely trim costs in the name of efficiencies during booms, instead of optimising for cash, new investments or your best assets, they will suffer in the inevitable downturns, etc. The former practices are common in Anglo-Saxon capitalism. Thus, the implication that manufacturing necessarily is more volatile during a downturn than services is superficial. It may be for the UK up till now, but it does not have to be that way and, even if it were, it may not be enough of an issue. How do you think some of those productivity gains were previously made - low hanging fruit?

nirvana 15y ago

"In fact, Mr. Dyson, Britain's most famous manufacturer, doesn't actually manufacture anything in Britain. He hasn't done so for 10 years, since he was refused local permission to expand his Wiltshire factory" That's it right there. He wasn't allowed to expand his factory. Presumably it was on land he already owned, right? It was an existing factory. He had to get permission to grow the economy by expanding, and that permission was denied. That's the core of it. So long as you need government permission to do anything, and that permission comes from someone who has no incentive to give it, and plenty of incentives to deny it (e.g.: covering their butt) this trend will continue. The british (and US) culture is "you have to get permission before you do anything", and that's a form of regulation that is really harmful to growth. That gives a lot of power to people who can be petty... but it also creates a lot of make work jobs that are politically very valuable (because , you see, donate to the right campaigns and your permission comes very easy. Donate to the wrong person and you have trouble doing anything.) The correct form of regulation is after the fact- if you do something wrong, violate someone's human or property rights, then you are punished. Its not like the permit based system is doing any review (that's the excuse but they rarely are funded well enough to really do this). I remember a friend who lived in central california who wanted to build a house. He was in an earthquake area and as a geologist he mapped out the fault lines and knew the relationship to his property of the nearest fault and thus the specific danger. He had a house designed that would withstand an earthquake on that fault and wanted to build it. He wasn't allowed to do that-- because his design was not the off the shelf slab house design. Liquifation makes slab houses very poor in an earthquake, but that is what the kid in the permit office was able to approve. He was literally forced to build a house that was unsafe to live in, because he couldn't get permits to build a safe one. They had no interest in doing an engineering review (that costs money) or in seeing the work of the engineers he'd hired. It was total joke. His alternative was simply to sell the land and move to another state.... instead he built his house (it was his dream house after all) only on a foundation that he knows will not survive the earthquake.

masklinn 15y ago
Not that I want to distract from you going Galt on us, but wikipedia has describes the event slightly differently: > In 2002, the company transferred vacuum cleaner production to Malaysia. Dyson claimed that they requested planning permission to expand the factory to increase vacuum cleaner production, but that this application failed. However, the local government claims that no such permission was ever sought, as the land Dyson planned to use was privately owned and the original owner did not want to sell.[0] > Although nearly 800 manufacturing jobs were lost, Dyson states that the cost savings from transferring production to Malaysia enabled investment in research & development at their Malmesbury head office.[1] And > The correct form of regulation is after the fact- if you do something wrong, violate someone's human or property rights, then you are punished. That's completely nonsensical, there are millions of things which can not be fixed when destroyed, the only way to handle them is to prevent them from being broken in the first place. Post-regulation of razing somebody else's home or of dumping toxic sludge on commons is indefensible. [0] http://www.allbusiness.com/government/government-bodies-offices-regional/12878932-1.html http://www.allbusiness.com/government/government-bodies-offi... [1] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/2282809.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/2282809.stm

JVIDEL 15y ago

It's the chicken and the egg with these guys: we can't get factories because all the components are made elsewhere, and we can't get the components because we have no factories... You can't use trade barriers anymore because if you block someone then you're getting blocked too. At the same time you can't let companies choose between local or abroad else those going to dirt-poor countries will have an unfair competitive edge that may bankrupt the ones that stayed, something that already happened 20 years ago. You know what's the biggest industrial innovation right now? Toyota's new model factory: it's designed to be moved at any time to anywhere in the world, cheap and fast. It has a lower degree of automation than most car factories, why? Because Toyota realized it was easier and cheaper to hire people than to use robots which are still very expensive and need to be reinstalled and reprogrammed each time you move them. That's the future of manufacturing: if X place is cheaper than our current location then we're moving everything there.

iRobot 15y ago

I'm guessing nothing has really changed.. Rasberry pi ?