Places like China assemble stuff by hand that would be automated in higher wage countries not because they don't know how, or higher wage countries have developed some new software they haven't. It's because wage costs are low. As soon as it makes economical sense to automate, companies do. It's not specific to geography, or technology, or anything of other than economics of thr world labor market.
If there's a problem with the FR-4 circuit boards, or the pick and place machines are misbehaving, or some of the chip-scale components that are being placed are faulty, or the wiring harness is wrong, or the molds for the body of the product need modifying because the product is cracking...
... it's much easier to deal with your supplier just down the road than one across the world.
These days stuff is manufactured in China because (the) stuff (that makes up the stuff) is manufactured in China.
Additive manufacturing is still too slow and expensive for mass production. As a recent Ars Technica article put it, it's fine for supercars but not for cars.
If there an issue, some engineer responsible for the part can be in the factory in under 24h
though I assume some of these are made by OEMs
They are.
The "no, _they're_ the idiots" rivalry between engineer / manufacturing is almost as old as time. A design team almost never gets to just "hand off" the files to the manufacturing side without some amount of issue/fix iteration happening.
It's not just the physical engineering of a device, though. If the $thing that is responsible for QA/Test or even programming keys into $widget goes down, the factory has to stop and that's _expensive_ so you get the guy that designed it out there to fix it _asap_.
When I was doing my master's degree I would bike down to Rotterdam where the largest importer of piping supplies in Europe was. I just wandered off the street and every part imaginable they could just pull off the shelf for me. I was converting all kinds of wild stuff, from metric to imperial and vice versa, there are about a billion different thread standards and manufacturing standards, they had convertors for everything. And cheap stuff to go the distance.
The funny thing was, I didn't know it was there, there was an Italian researcher visiting that told me about it. However, he said that in Italy where he did his research he needed to travel over an hour to get to something similar. After that, I realized there were many pieces of my project that had large warehouses like this in Rotterdam due to the harbour. They often had tiny little windows with people with plus 20/30 years of experience, just taking orders, and coming up with solutions for your problems with a list of parts that would get you there. Then you would walk away with 50 bits, and a bill that was less than 40 euros. Madness.
Not only. It's also because important parts can't be automated with current technology.
It's also not that Chinese factories substitute robots for manual workers. They automate the shit out of them too, and have the same share of robots vs workers that a western factory would...
I said the opposite, that in China they automate just as much as western factories (if not more, see the sibling comment).
Example: A company I was working for produced booklets with their own autmatic book printing binding machine. Not long ago, they outsourced it to a printer because it was cheaper that way. So the single more capable printer's "robot" is replacing the need for a lot of other not so efficient small "robots".
It's not China manufacturing iPhone, its Apple and its partners.
So your first sentence should not have China as a subject.
>Without further context, we cannot say whether a lower number of robots in the US is an indication of inferiority or superiority to China.
Its not a national defence thing. It's not the US vs China. It's Apple. Apple US, Apple China, same thing, still Apple.
Apple makes a factory, that factory has certain economics based on its inputs (labor, materials) and outputs (iphones). Nowhere does China come into play.
We live in a globalized world, it is run by large rich companies, not governments.
An example is pick and place assembly of circuit boards. For large quantities, meaning the loading of the feeders is not a big part of the cost, a local company can match or undercut the price of an offshore company.
A counterexample is chip fabrication, where the capital cost dominates (and even if it didn't wafers are often manually handled).
If the labor in China is cheaper than the robot + the person that operates the robot, then it is cheaper to build it there.
Building it locally only makes economic sense if the design is changing frequently (e.g., using local pick and place for prototyping), or if it is built to order, so the time it spends on the boat actually matters.
As an extreme example, giant Italian windows cost about the same, delivered, in the US as inferior domestic ones do. The main downside is the lead time. In particular, thanks to a drought, traffic through the panama canal is all screwed up these days, so getting them to the west coast is hard.
If the economics tilt this way for shipping giant panes of glass, they certainly also do for tiny, high priced electronic devices.
Of course, externalities (e.g., environmental impact of Chinese manufacturing, human rights, national security and xenophobia) could change the tradeoffs.
How does that work? Or are you just referring to electronic components only and it being zero relatively speaking?
And this is not some hand-waving explanation either, since other factors dominates the environmental impact (for example, shipping from Newegg to your office is probably a magnitude more polluted), it doesn't matter if the factory is in China or the US. This applies to a lot more things, even lower value stuffs like fruit. Which is why local produce might have more environmental impact than imported mass produce fruits, though I don't have a citation for this on hand.
One container from Shenzhen to Oakland (~10,000 km) is going to be the CO₂ equivalent of burning 60 gallons of gasoline.
"Of total global air emissions, marine shipping accounts for 18 to 30 percent of the nitrogen oxides and 9% of the sulfur oxides."[1]
"One source of environmental stresses on maritime vessels recently has come from states and localities, as they assess the contribution of commercial marine vessels to regional air quality problems when ships are docked at port.[33] For instance, large marine diesel engines are believed to contribute 7 percent of mobile source nitrogen oxide emissions in Baton Rouge and New Orleans, Louisiana. Ships can also have a significant impact in areas without large commercial ports: they contribute about 37 percent of total area nitrogen oxide emissions in the Santa Barbara, California area, and that percentage is expected to increase to 61 percent by 2015."[1]
" Maritime transport accounts for 3.5% to 4% of all greenhouse gas emissions, primarily carbon dioxide.[1][27] According to the World Bank, in 2022, the shipping industry's 3% of global greenhouse gas emissions make it "the sixth largest greenhouse gas emitter worldwide, ranking between Japan and Germany."[1]
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_effects_of_shi...
A full container of goods costs about 60 gallons of diesel to ship across the world.
That same container costs 60 gallons to move 360 miles from a port.
Delivery vehicles drive approximately 0.8 miles per package delivered, and get around 10-20mpg delivering, so each package costs 1/10 to 1/20 of a gallon of fuel to deliver from the depot to your door. Assuming there are 4000 eventual packages in a container, the last mile delivery for the container is 200-400 gallons.
Obviously this is not the case where the final destination is a large receiver, but even then there are still significant transportation impacts in most cases.
I hate the fact that when I read the part about sulfur dioxide I’m like, well, that’s good at least lol. There’s some evidence that cleaning up ship emissions might be a significant contributor to recent sea temperature acceleration, since the cloud seeding effect from ocean shipping has been drastically reduced.
End of page 129, start of page 130 (page 3 and 4 in pdf file).
Truck used twice as much energy consumption as all marine vessels. Dry cargo (there are a bunch of ships shipping oils and LNG too) is generally around 60% of marine vessels.
It's like that whole global dimming thing with con trails after 9/11 but with ship trails.
There is such a thing as pressure to automate. You could imagine a world where wage costs just stay low, and companies just keep making stuff by hand. Companies need to know that there is a cost-benefit trade to be made.
And so an article like this is nodding at that pressure from the opposite direction:
"Hey, you should be aware that automation (cost savings) are totally feasible, even if they're not realistic for you at this exact moment."
For example, every Chinese city has sidewalks made, not of poured concrete, but rather 30 cm x 30 cm ceramic tiles. Due to historic city planning, the Chinese tend to park their cars on the sidewalks, which inevitably breaks the tiles, thus causing regular replacement. These tiles are laid not by some sort of brick laying machine, but rather by hand.
The sidewalk by my house was poured in 1968. I know that, because there's a date stamped in it. A couple of blocks over there's a sidewalk that someone scrawled graffiti into. "Elton John 75". There's literally nothing wrong with either of these sidewalks. They're not cracked, nor buckled.
China doesn't need to replace every sidewalk every two or three years, but they choose to.
These sidewalks were from the 60s and 70s too -- thing is that they cracked 20-30 years ago and no one ever bothered to replace. The home owners i've spoken to that wish they could were confronted with the aspect of being forced to pay for their entire street lest they wish to pull permits to repair their small section.
So you have this new problem with a liability tug-of-war between well-wishing civillians against the cost-saving municipalities, and to be clear this was more than one single municipality, i've seen it across SoCal.
So, what i'm trying to get across is that there is a middle ground between 'needless replacement for the sake of generating work' and 'neglect', and neither China or the US has seemed to pin that middle down yet : but that needless replacement regime sure sounds nice as a pedestrian that just wants to use the goddamn sidewalk. I've seen busy-work before, that just doesn't strike me as that.
I think it’s ultimately part of our philosophy toward the built environment that “Europe is built with screws, the US is built with nails”— we build something that gets the job done at the time it’s built, then never come back to it. Maybe that allowed us to build fast, but now the bigger issue is maintenance of what we already have.
nails - less axial load with shear stress
nails are made of a more pliable metal, whereas screws are more brittle. the real "long-term" fastener, in my opinion, would be bolts; but I don't see anyone using those to frame a house.
BTW I have no statistics on Chinese sidewalk maintenance, but when I lived there development was so fast that a sidewalk would have to be broken up every 2, 3 years anyway for new cables, pipes or whatever. I always wondered why they didn't use the tile plus sand system, as this involved always in noisy and dusty concrete hammering.
You could argue that Full Employment is tenet of Communism.
I'll leave debate about what Communism is and what the CCCP is and isn't to the rest of the internet. I'm sure there are people out there who would love to have a conversation about it... LOL ;-)
As soon as you unsubscribe to US perspectives, nobody is detailing conversations about the PRC ultimately winning that territory and the ways it behaves, it is very easy to operate there on a day to day basis
That doesn’t necessarily mean everything is centrally planned vs everything is a market. A variety of approaches can be used to satisfy the interests of the ruling class, within the constraints they have.
So in China there is definitely state intervention to ensure there are enough good jobs. But that can also mean speeding up development and automating so the jobs are better, while creating new jobs by producing new things society needs or wants.
Communism relies on 2 phases, the first phase requires all power and resources consolidation in a standing committee, the second phase then allows for the collective communist nirvana. The second has never happened anywhere.
The standing committee realized that and switched away from attempting that, veering to state capitalism to bring a controlled set of benefits from capitalist drive. They still teach that they are doing marxism but there is nothing working class about the party.
One way to corroborate this is to look at what the Tianemen Square protesters wanted. They wanted democracy: to democratically vote in more communism. The standing committee is not interested in that.
People that fall for “true communism” - phase 2 - always get disillusioned when they notice the wool pulled over their eyes by a select few taking all resources for themselves, instead of for “collective” ownership by the workers.
For example, I have spoken to many Romanians that lived through the 89 events who see it as a coup against socialist democracy. It succeeded in România, it failed in China.
Also, communism and automation _absolutely_ go hand in hand. Both socialism and communism have no absolute need for employment, that is a very capitalist view. The requirement for communism and socialism is that every one’s needs are met. So long as the state can provide food, shelter, etc, the only reason people should have to work is to help meet those goals through production.