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New t-shirt sewing robot can make as many shirts per hour as 17 factory workers

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Re: New t-shirt sewing robot can make as many shirts per hour as 17 factory workers

#11

Post by Symbiote »

dannysu wrote: post #8
bmcusick wrote: post #2

$0.33 per shirt, anywhere in the world, is nearly as cheap as the cheapest sweatshop markets. I expect most commentary will look at this using a US vs China thing, but I'm more worried about SE Asia and Africa. They need to climb up the development ladder that China's already 1/2-way up. Say what you will about clothing and sneaker sweatshops, but they were a tried and tested method for building up the basics of an i…

Not sure how accurate. I think clothing has already moved away from China. I have shirts made in Bangladesh. And according to [1], workers get paid $0.12 per shirt. Like you said, $0.33 vs $0.12 is super close it seems. [1]: http://www.ecouterre.com/infographic-how-much-does-that-14-t-shirt-really-cost/

The article says the cost in Bangladesh is 22 cents.

That is surely close enough, after taking into account transport and lead time, that factories in Bangladesh should be worried.

Re: New t-shirt sewing robot can make as many shirts per hour as 17 factory workers

#12

Post by HillaryBriss »

Symbiote wrote: post #11
dannysu wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure how accurate. I think clothing has already moved away from China. I have shirts made in Bangladesh. And according to [1], workers get paid $0.12 per shirt. Like you said, $0.33 vs $0.12 is super close it seems. [1]: http://www.ecouterre.com/infographic-how-much-does-that-14-t-shirt-really-cost/

The article says the cost in Bangladesh is 22 cents. That is surely close enough, after taking into account transport and lead time, that factories in Bangladesh should be worried.

how much will the human labor cost per shirt be once these automatic t-shirt machines are moved to Bangladesh?

Re: New t-shirt sewing robot can make as many shirts per hour as 17 factory workers

#13

Post by adventured »

dannysu wrote: post #6

This reminds me about when Bill Gates make that comment saying that raising the minimal wage could make the cost trade-off of investing in automation worthwhile [1]. On one hand, people need living wages. But on the other hand, I think we're witnessing what Bill Gates is talking about here. What's the solution? Gates has floated the idea of taxing robots. [1]: http://www.businessinsider.com/bill-gates-bots-are-taking…

Bill Gates, as noted in your linked article, is against aggressively raising the minimum wage.

As with Warren Buffett, he is in favor of raising the income tax credit rather than the minimum wage. It's a radically better solution for improving wages in the near-term. A too-high minimum wage artificially cuts off the supply of who a business can hire, based on what someone's labor is worth to said business (they have to be able to afford the cost of the labor). An increased income tax credit, paid for via higher taxes on the top ~1/3 income bracket, avoids the problem of pricing low skilled labor out of the market and enables businesses to hire a lot more people whose labor isn't yet worth eg $10 or $15 / hour.

Taxing productivity is an extraordinarily bad idea. It's up there with taxing every search result or trying to slow down computing productivity by abusively taxing cloud computing or smartphone & PC usage.

Re: New t-shirt sewing robot can make as many shirts per hour as 17 factory workers

#14

Post by amaranth »

chrisreichel wrote: post #3

Why should I be surprised. That's been happening since 1700´s [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Revolution ] Perhaps that will be the way the most developed Countries will return some of the production lines to them.

Even aside from the argument about production never actually leaving developed countries (only the non-automatable stuff left, the rest is growing faster than ever) this won't really have much benefit. If people in your country are buying the shirts these companies make there is already tax being taken for them and it's not like they'll add enough jobs to even notice, that's the whole point.

Re: New t-shirt sewing robot can make as many shirts per hour as 17 factory workers

#15

Post by RobertoG »

chrisreichel wrote: post #3

Why should I be surprised. That's been happening since 1700´s [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Revolution ] Perhaps that will be the way the most developed Countries will return some of the production lines to them.

"Perhaps that will be the way the most developed Countries will return some of the production lines to them"

Why do you care about that? ecology?

It's not like if it's going to translate in jobs.

Re: New t-shirt sewing robot can make as many shirts per hour as 17 factory workers

#16

Post by amrrs »

Should we need a basic standard of what can be called Robots? We're in an age of journalism where almost anything that can do what humans do (Guess, had calculator been invented in this age,'This automated Robot can do as many calculation as 3 Accountants' would have been a viral article) is called a Robot. But what we forget is that it's always been the case all this while, Consider a Toll collection booth with humans in it and then an RFID based automated system, I don't remember if those got this kind of attention as Toll Collecting Robots.

Re: New t-shirt sewing robot can make as many shirts per hour as 17 factory workers

#17

Post by elevensies »

dannysu wrote: post #6

This reminds me about when Bill Gates make that comment saying that raising the minimal wage could make the cost trade-off of investing in automation worthwhile [1]. On one hand, people need living wages. But on the other hand, I think we're witnessing what Bill Gates is talking about here. What's the solution? Gates has floated the idea of taxing robots. [1]: http://www.businessinsider.com/bill-gates-bots-are-taking…

People with immense wealth (Gates, Buffet, ...) are great at coming up with innovative tax schemes to tax anything other than wealth.

Re: New t-shirt sewing robot can make as many shirts per hour as 17 factory workers

#18

Post by michaelbuckbee »

Overtonwindow wrote: post #4

I can't quite decide which will be the tipping point for robots replacing humans: Agriculture, food service, or garments. The first seems ripe (no pun intended) for disruption but apparently often requires human skill to identify products. The second seems more likely, as fast food is mostly automated with some human intervention; coupled with self-checkout technology in any language, and it might work. Garments, how…

I recently came across this video of a color sensing tomato sorting machine.

https://youtu.be/j4RWJTs0QCk

Really shifted my mental ranking of where agricultural processing was at.

Re: New t-shirt sewing robot can make as many shirts per hour as 17 factory workers

#19

Post by abakker »

amrrs wrote: post #16

Should we need a basic standard of what can be called Robots? We're in an age of journalism where almost anything that can do what humans do (Guess, had calculator been invented in this age,'This automated Robot can do as many calculation as 3 Accountants' would have been a viral article) is called a Robot. But what we forget is that it's always been the case all this while, Consider a Toll collection booth with huma…

Don't even get me started on "Software Robots", aka RPA (Robotic process automation). Yikes what a misuse of terminology.

Re: New t-shirt sewing robot can make as many shirts per hour as 17 factory workers

#20

Post by bmcusick »

HillaryBriss wrote: post #12
Symbiote wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article says the cost in Bangladesh is 22 cents. That is surely close enough, after taking into account transport and lead time, that factories in Bangladesh should be worried.

how much will the human labor cost per shirt be once these automatic t-shirt machines are moved to Bangladesh?

Robot production lines need robot technicians to support them. I doubt you'll find many of those in Bangladesh any time soon.
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