The Lonely Future of Buying Stuff

Re:The Lonely Future of Buying Stuff by daurnimator on Wednesday December 27, 2017 @10:26PM (#16020093)

I imagine the flow is:

  - Location selected based on cost of labor.
  - Major port is developed to deal with large amounts of goods
  - A few more factories/industries start in same area due to port accessibility
  - Refineries are built to be close to location of usage (now they import raw materials instead of refined materials)
  - More factories are built due to easy availability of resources + accessible port for export
  - Labor gets more expensive, but economies of scale of factories + refineries means it is cheaper to stay in place then to move elsewhere
  - Automation slowly displaces labour.

End result being that economies of scale in manufacturing and refining make it cheaper to centralise manufacture and pay for shipping the end product than to decentralise and pay for small factories/refineries everywhere + shipping of raw resources.

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Re:The Lonely Future of Buying Stuff by mulmen on Thursday December 28, 2017 @01:49AM (#16020736)

I think you are right about this.

As a thought experiment if there was a magical 3d printer that could take any number of raw materials as inputs and combine them in any way would it become more efficient to ship a mix of raw materials to each end consumer? Say I consume x amount of rubber, y amount of cotton, z amount of plastic, etc in my consumer goods in a day, week, month whatever. Could it be more efficient to get the rubber and cotton to my door and run them through the printer than it would to build the shoes, basketballs and t-shirts somewhere else and ship them?

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Re:The Lonely Future of Buying Stuff by pjc50 on Thursday December 28, 2017 @05:24AM (#16021295)

This only works if the materials are homogenous (can be used for lots of different things), don't require too much packaging and shipping overhead themselves, and there isn't a wastage issue from the manufacturing process. And the manufacturer is willing to let the IP out of their factory and into the wild where it can be pirated.

It's a bit like Blue Apron etc; you pay a small premium for the theatre of doing the assembly step yourself.

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