The end of the article is bit of a nonsense: why, we have to save big failed corporations like GMC just because of the supply chain ?Are you kidding me? The supply chain of these manufacturers is going nowhere. If they were dismantled, other companies would buy their assets anyway and keep using them on American soil. Nothing is completely lost.
The Beer Game -or- Why Apple Can’t Build iPads in the US
191–200 of 261 posts
Re: The Beer Game -or- Why Apple Can’t Build iPads in the US
#192I love the article up until the lame political statement at the end. GM / Chrysler bankruptcy != Business disappears and all suppliers go bankrupt. This is the straw-man argument of the left. The American auto bailout was a purely political play to save the unions who supported the Democrats. With billions in hard assets and a huge intellectual property base, the auto companies would have made great investments to po…
> The American auto bailout was a purely political play to save the unions who supported the Democrats. Are you kidding? http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1208/16740.html
Bush made the initial federal loans to keep them from going broke. Obama made a second bailout, but this time in exchange for equity, which gave the US government a commanding share in GM and Chrysler. It wasn't couched in so many words, but GM and Chrysler were actually nationalized.
Re: The Beer Game -or- Why Apple Can’t Build iPads in the US
#193Earlier quoted context omitted.
Actually, I'd say this is a long-term problem that we won't solve until we stop expecting everyone to have a job and figure out some way to distribute out to everyone a piece of the value created by automation.
Some day we are going to expect only some people to have to work for a living? How are we going to choose the poor saps that have to work while the robots feed all the rest of us while we sit by our swimming pools?
A few other countries have it more-or-less figured out the basics, though without this future need in mind. Countries with a "guaranteed basic income" do this. There's also Milton Friedman's "Negative Income Tax" idea. At some point, we're going to be looking at world where few /people/ are honestly needed to do anything, and we will in fact need a way to support them. The post-scarcity society envisioned by some is probably no longer centuries away.
What's more interesting is how thinkers from various political persuasions have had their opinions on the matter converge to this answer while the dominant narratives (in the US at least) stay centered on variants of no-rules early Capitalism (Republicans/Libertarians), neo-Mercantilism (China), or 1950s union-jobs-for-life (Democrats), all of which seem increasingly untenable. Watch this (starts getting really interesting around 1:00) for more:
Re: The Beer Game -or- Why Apple Can’t Build iPads in the US
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
The robot tech might be developed in the US (or where ever) but is still built in China. That makes sense, because it's used in China. And as expertise in building stuff concentrates in China all they need to do is keep quality high, keep costs low, and maybe keep an eye on human rights, and they'll keep the jobs. If we assume raw materials are bought on the global market (so same price in the US and China), then the…
I believe you are missing regulatory compliance costs, which are significant in the US. I'm not quite sure how robotics alters that variable though.
They help some but it doesn't go away 100%. Robots mean lower worker regulatory costs, but environmental regulation costs still count against the US.
Re: The Beer Game -or- Why Apple Can’t Build iPads in the US
#195Relevant article by Andy Grove on US manufacturing from 2010: http://www.businessweek.com/print/magazine/content/10_28/b41...
Re: The Beer Game -or- Why Apple Can’t Build iPads in the US
#196I hear a lot of people saying that America needs more manufacturing jobs, but I can't recall ever hearing anyone say that they want to spend the rest of their life doing repetitive assembly operations on a production line. We use Chinese workers because they're cheaper than robots. These are awful, tedious, soul-destroying jobs, but they're just marginally better than backbreaking agricultural labour. Nobody deserves…
I wonder, would agricultural labour be backbreacking if you only had to meet your own demand (and owned enough fields for the purpose)? Serious question, I don't know.
I've only had to work in vegetable and fruit gardens belonging to my grandmother, but if it scales, then yes, it would be backbreaking. Only worth it if you enjoy it or otherwise derive self-actualization from it etc.
Re: The Beer Game -or- Why Apple Can’t Build iPads in the US
#197The reason why iPads are built in China is because of a thing called Comparative Advantage [1]. Even though the US could reasonably produce iPads _more_ efficiently than China, it doesn't. The reason is that the US is even more efficient at supplying higher-cost services (software, finance, etc.) than China that it would be at producing iPads. Therefore, the US is better off training more of its workforce for higher-…
Unfortunately, the "comparative advantage" in this case results mostly of self-inflicted woulds on the part of USG. For a company with highly productive employees such as Google, the large fixed cost associated with labor-law compliance isn't that big a deal, but for low-wage jobs it can be comparable to the cash compensation. There's no shortage of low-cost laborers in the US; it's just that onerous regulations pric…
Onerous how? I'm not a business owner (well, I am, but with a staff size of one, which is mostly irrelevant to this conversation) - the regulations i've seen don't seem that bad.
Could you be more specific?
Re: The Beer Game -or- Why Apple Can’t Build iPads in the US
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
...paying American wages would add up to $65 to each iPhone’s expense. The point of the article is to illustrate that wages are not the only problem. Chaotic effects in multi-tier supply chains are also a real problem. I would pay more for an iPhone that I knew was made in America. I'm sure I'm not the only one. You are certainly a minority. I don't think most people value nationalism at $65. Personally, I'd rather h…
You only chose to respond to a portion of what I wrote or didn't read the first sentence so I've italicized it for clarification: they just might not be able to produce 100% of their products there [in Fremont] . Maybe you're not familiar with guitars either, but Fender American made are substantially more expensive but they are in definitely in demand. There is also demand for a cheaper entry level product--both pro…
Guitars in this category would be Veblen goods, IMO; not simple commodities, but status-exhibiting luxuries. Apple is more mass-market than that I think.
Analysing things based on cost is something economists do for lots of good analytical reasons, not necessarily because of some philosophical bent. Customers' preferences between various brands and perceived value systems can be turned into costs through pricing experiments.
"Superficially 'like me'", as the word "me" indicates, was not an assumption about you, and nor was it describing you as superficial (that looks like quite a misreading on your part from where I stand). Rather, it is an implicit criticism of nationalism, of the idea that people of one's nationality deserve better employment terms for some intrinsic reason (i.e. they are better) than people lucky or unlucky enough to be born under a different flag.
Re: The Beer Game -or- Why Apple Can’t Build iPads in the US
#199I hear a lot of people saying that America needs more manufacturing jobs, but I can't recall ever hearing anyone say that they want to spend the rest of their life doing repetitive assembly operations on a production line. We use Chinese workers because they're cheaper than robots. These are awful, tedious, soul-destroying jobs, but they're just marginally better than backbreaking agricultural labour. Nobody deserves…
I wonder, would agricultural labour be backbreacking if you only had to meet your own demand (and owned enough fields for the purpose)? Serious question, I don't know.
Yes it is backbreaking or you are trapped by low margins into ever increasing size of fields so you can afford technology not to break your back.
Re: The Beer Game -or- Why Apple Can’t Build iPads in the US
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are correct, and I wanted to check what exactly they did say. Luckily, there is a full transcript: http://podcast.thisamericanlife.org/special/TAL_460_Retracti... The discussion on this point starts on page 17. In there is the point I originally wanted to make, voiced by Charles Duhigg: But labor is such an enormously small part of any electronic device, right? Compared to the cost of buying chips or making sure…
Let's put it this way if your adding 5% to the cost of the product adding a 4 week supply components that you sell at 1/2 price every year. Moving iPhone manufacturing to the US would cost Apple significantly more than that. It's true that one of the major problems with a supply chain for computer components is how rapidly they depreciate, but labor costs are insignificant in large part because they are in China. Hon…
The PCBs in cell phones are almost exclusively done by machines. You can't hand solder a BGA, a machine applies solder paste as the last step in the PCB manufacturing process and then a pick and place (robotic arm pulling parts off reels) sets the chips before sending the PCB through a reflow machine (an oven).
Even for small batch runs of boards with QFP chips (which you can hand solder) you would machine all this, and I mean like 50 board runs. I've even done this in lab for 10 board proto runs. You make a solder paste stencil out of plastic to apply the paste after you get the boards back from the PCB manufacturer, place the chips and solder them in a reflow oven (or even a frying pan works if you paying attention and have an IR temp sensor).
The only bits you hand solder, even in Asian, are components that are too large or can't withstand the temperatures of machine soldering, be it wave or reflow (think full size RCA connectors on a board with many fine pitch ICs or a wall wart). This is normally a post processing step after everything else has been reflowed. Connectors of this type don't really exist in cell phones, they are all surface mount with some minimal unsoldered through hole supports.
The manual assembly that comes into play with a modern cell phone involves connecting the various PCBs with their interconnects and placing them in the proper location within the packaging and of course all the post electronics stuff.