

Chumby's Chinese Factories (read previous posts too) - joshwa
http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=185

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iheartmemcache
Just for a little bit of trivia, Andrew "Bunnie" Huang is the guy who
originally cracked X-box while at MIT. The guy is _ridiculously_ smart and I'd
recommend reading his blog (it's quite interesting).

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patio11
Probably the worst legal job available in my town (poor pay, terrible hours,
etc etc) is for a factory which makes more cell phone camera lens gaskets than
any company in the world. These come off the production line in sheets of a
thousand. Your mission, should you choose to accept it: tweezer them off the
sheet and onto the waiting chasis. Your quota: a thousand an hour.

There is an acceptable rate for misplacement, which I shouldn't tell you:
suffice it to say that my region credits its anal-retentive attention to
detail with allowing other, lazier Japanese people to take over worldwide
automotive industry.

They have a waiting list for this job a mile long at the moment (my neck of
the woods is hurting in the current economic environment).

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Sukotto
for those of you, like me, who have no idea what product the original post is
talking about, I found the following on boingboing

Chumby is an exciting startup that's making a small, WiFi-enabled, squeezable
bean-bag computer that is a delight to hack and play with. You can design your
own soft enclosure, install your own OS, write your own apps, or just download
programs that do everything from play music and video to run your Chumby as an
alarm-clock.

Chumby's co-father is Andrew "Bunnie" Huang, the hardware-hacker virtuoso who
broke the crypto on the Xbox and paved the way for all the Xbox hacks that
followed (documented in his extraordinary book Hacking the Xbox). Bunnie is a
passionate advocate for hardware hackers and software hackers, and it shows in
Chumby's open design.

<http://boingboing.net/2006/09/11/chumby-chairman-inte.html>

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liquidben
Great info, but I thought that I'd supplement that, noting that they also have
the Chumby One, which is a hard shell version without included battery. Mine
is placed mainly to stare at as I dumbly eat cereal first thing in the morning
<http://www.chumby.com/pages/compare>

And of course the main website is <http://www.chumby.com/>

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antidaily
I bought a Chumby One for my place and also as xmas gifts for my family.
Everyone loves them. It's worth it for the music capabilities alone.

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dailo10
I like how he sums it all up:

"Thanks to him, chumbys are $2 cheaper which frees up more money for us
consumers to spend on $2 coffees at Starbucks."

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brianobush
My prediction that the current savings slowly erode over time as cost of
living rises in China. Hopefully, this will allow automation to come into play
in production facilities.

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donaldc
Likely at that point, they'll probably just ship basic assembly off to other
countries where the cost of living is still lower...

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codexon
Is no one else a bit skeptical about the quality of the products? Having 1
person eyeball PCB connectors with tweezers doesn't look like good
manufacturing and probably prone to shorts.

<http://bunniestudios.com/blog/images/mic_skill.jpg>

I don't know about everyone else, but I would rather pay the extra $0.95 out
of a $119.95 chumby.

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sern
No, because that one person, having placed thousands of connectors, is most
likely better at the job than you or anyone you know. Also, these are
connectors - it'd be obvious in testing if they didn't work.

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codexon
Not everything is reliably tested a couple days after manufacturing. many
people have had capacitors gone bad right after warranty, and just because the
manufacturer wanted to save $2-3 dollars.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague>

If your suppliers are like this, there is no telling what they will do to cut
costs. A cursory test right out of production is not panacea.

~~~
cma
Hindsight is 20-20.

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poutine
Right now as the article explains it's cheaper to use humna labour to do many
manufacturing tasks, especially for low volume orders. What I find interesting
to think about is the cross over point where it does actually become cheaper
to use machines for most or all manufacturing. I think this is all but
inevitable. What happens to a country like China when this occurs?

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radu_floricica
The short answer is that it hurts. I still remember the moment I managed to
grok this, some 10 years ago.

Say some people manage to design machines which can build stuff a whooping 20%
cheaper. Because it's an obvious thing to do, you'll have all the factories in
the country switch to these machines, and fire a majority of their workforce.
Now, on one hand you have a 20% increase in productivity and on the other hand
you have 50% unemployment.

You don't have greedy capitalists making money: most of the 20% goes to the
consumer, thanks to the competitive market. The biggest share of the money
probably goes to the machine builders, but they earned them fair and square:
they innovated and thanks to them the job can be done better, easier and
cheaper. But overall you still have huge unemployment.

So what is the answer? The answer is a shift in the workforce away from
manual-jobs. Simply put, continuous education. It's a fact of life that almost
nobody is truly safe in this day and age. Not programmers, nor prostitutes. We
could all have our jobs innovated away from us. But this is only a bad thing
for those who let the current job become the sole means of paying for the
mortgage.

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jwhitlark
How on earth do you call that skill? He's repeating a small set of steps
innumerable times. That's not skill, it's being fast at _one_ thing. We tried
treating people like machines in the West a century ago, and over time, it
doesn't work worth shit.

I thought this article might have been satire, but apparently not...

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grinich
_That's not skill, it's being fast at one thing._

Being fast at one thing is definitely a skill, if not a talent.

<http://www.nbcolympics.com/>

~~~
jwhitlark
I take your point, however, the whole point of this type of narrow work
breakdown is to be able to train someone unskilled to do a small, single task
well. In other words, this may be _a_ skill, but you wouldn't consider the
worker _skilled_.

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papersmith
One theory as to why China never underwent industrial revolution in the 1700s
was the high efficiency of manual labour, which got them stuck in a local
maximum.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_level_equilibrium_trap>

