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Comment by FpUser | Hacker News Reader

This is my friend's story. He owns a company that designs and manufactures various electro-mechanical things. So he went there to check quality of his order that was getting ready for shipping. All went nice and shiny and then as he was about to head back to an airport he mentioned that he now has to find where to buy 150,000 non standard size batteries for the things being made. So the the owner said wait a min. Dials his buddy with another factory that happen to manufacture batteries and explains the task. So they set up the line and in 3 hours he had the whole amount made and put in crates.

Friend says it is insane how advanced the whole manufacturing is in China. It is engineer's paradise. Of course one has to be smart as they do not mind stealing the design and doing it themselves.

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> Friend says it is insane how advanced the whole manufacturing is in China. It is engineer's paradise. Of course one has to be smart as they do not mind stealing the design and doing it themselves.

It is possible that these things are related.

Everything is so efficient because rent-seeking on "intellectual property" is not an option. You have to execute well or somebody else will do it better.

It's great for operations but precludes major investment in new inventions.

Unless the major investments are government funded. Last I heard, china was doing really well with quantum technology and maglev trains.

it reminds me of the early / glory days of piracy. I've seen a lot of kids just torrenting software for their needs and just getting started with video game programming, music, or other fields. What I liked about it, is that you could just get started with something right away, with the right tools without having to think about the financial aspect of things.

Last time I check unreal engine works a bit like that, it is free to download and use as long as you don't make more than x amount of money per year, when you start making decent money you'll give a percentage to Epic. I wish more things would work this way.

Autodesk finally wisened up to this and has fully featured educational licenses for free

Autodesk's actions are most probably a response to feeling the heat from stable, multi-faceted & open source Modelling, Animation and Sculpting tool, Blender which is completely free, receiving considerable attention from industry recently (after v2.8)

This is not really what happened. I have toured many battery factories in Dongguan - they have stock on-hand even of non standard sizes. I have been shown the actual inventory spreadsheets from product managers. Also, buying batteries from a friend of a friend is very risky...batteries are the most risky thing to buy, at least li-ion, you are almost guaranteed to violate International shipping laws.

Well I am just selling the story my friend told me. Since it happened a while ago I assume that the batteries were fine or I would hear much bitching from the same friend of mine ;)

> he now has to find where to buy 150,000 non standard size batteries for the things being made.

Non-standard you say? Clever. Now the guy who sold him the electronics just made a whole bunch of money not only from your friend, but also from the a batteries buddy.

> Now the guy who sold him the electronics just made a whole bunch of money not only from your friend, but also from the a batteries buddy.

That is how things work, and nothing wrong with that. If not money then a favor got chalked up which would be reciprocated when it is called for.

What's your point? This is how any business operates except some non taxable charity activities

This form of capitalism is anathema to those who consider the world rich enough, and therefore misunderstand that hard work is as much a part of capitalist wealth as anything else. Those 150,000 batteries didn't make themselves, and the guys who knew how to get it done in a few hours wouldn't be in that condition if they didn't earn the capital required to make it happen ..

That last bit sounds like the open source spirit we see in software is somewhat manifested in the hardware world.

In spirt agreed, I don't know when `in letter` developing software will catch up with this efficiency. That will need a paradigm shift and looking back 50 years, one would have assumed it the other way round; this opinion is from a novice like me who is only exposed to SW and in a very limited capacity to HW world.

Bunnie Huang refers to it as gongkai: https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=4297

> So they set up the line and in 3 hours he had the whole amount made and put in crates.

Just thinking about how all the companies I work for would handle this makes me very ashamed

> it is insane how advanced the whole manufacturing is in China

I think what you describe is flexibility, not advancement. The distinction is important.

Advanced manufacturing implies that (assuming the batteries were manufactured from scratch) it was possible to either create a new automated manufacturing line quickly to manufacture exactly those batteries or that a generic line was available that was designed to be able to manufacture any battery needed with minimal changes/set-up time.

Flexibility, on the other hand, can easily/quickly be achieved by using lots of cheap labor if people are used to following instructions. If you have a battery plant that operates entirely manually, then retasking it temporarily to produce a different size or shape of battery is not very hard, provided it's not a really strange size or shape that requires different engineering or specialized manufacturing.

You just change a couple of stages in the process to use different parts or shapes of materials. The people can easily adapt, they're people, and placing parts X,Y, and Z together to make a battery isn't much different from placing parts A,B, and C together to do the same. Packaging and testing are nearly identical.

It's not advanced, though... it's very flexible and cheap, but very low tech.

There's nothing wrong with that, but terms are important. The Chinese electronics industry is advancing quickly, but not that fast.

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