Re:Apple, ARM, and Intel
by zozbot234 on Tuesday June 16, 2020 @01:43PM
(#23541867)
The "Race to the bottom" will be ongoing for a long time. The nice thing about manufacturing for a middle-income economy is precisely its role as a stepping point to far higher productivity in services and high-skill sectors - this means that many developing economies will naturally tend to become manufacturing-intensive over time, even beyond the East- and South-East Asian countries that most observers focus on at the moment. The U.S. is supposed to be well beyond that point already.
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Problem is most people are past that. China and India do have a few more poor people to take cheap low skill jobs, but overall cost of labor is going up in both countries and manufacturers are starting to look elsewhere. Problem is that elsewhere is countries with much less population so they will run out.
It probably won't be in my lifetime, but my kids need to plan for the day when there isn't a cheap labor source waiting to tap. It will be a good problem to have (think about all the engineers making life better), but it will be a problem.
Re:Apple, ARM, and Intel
by StillBored on Tuesday June 16, 2020 @10:33PM
(#23547082)
I think its a bit like a game of hot potato, where the final manufacturing location will basically end up being a global power house for the next couple centuries.
Which at the moment looks to be china, despite textiles trying to move to lower cost countries, the magnetic force of ongoing factory automation in china might pull them back. The US deindustrilized to early for any of these really to come back without some seriously focused "billionaire" class investors putting their money first (aka Musk).
How much can we learn from each other? I work at a factory making things, we have locations around the world because our final products don't fit in a shipping container so local factories out compete global ones. That means that we have manufacturing experts scattered all over the world. We buy parts from all over and share knowledge. (expect China, we are careful what gets shared with China)
Spending on external training is $83bln [1]. Internal training program spend is an order of magnitude higher. Let alone salaries.
That is a lot of spending that could be transitioned to robotics if humans become too costly.
1: https://trainingmag.com/trgmag-article/2019-training-industr...