Guys. You are missing the obvious answer here. More than half of the world's industrial robots are installed in China. Furthermore, they have been developing their internal supply chain for decades on end. Their economies of scale are very strong.
I swear, the orientalism is very strong on this post. It cannot be that a country is yielding the fruits of decades of hard work building up their industry. It has to be slave labor ...
It's not like this is coming out of nowhere, there's some pretty compelling reasons to be concerned about forced labor in the Temu supply chain.
Temu is late stage capitalism cancer.
Chinese goods are heavily subsidized because the chinese state knows humans with free time and no money are an expensive liabiliry. They see busywork in itself as useful in itself, if it brings in any foreing currency on top, that's just gravy.
Of course, Temu is a secret CCP plan to fight unemployment!
Yeah, but that's a hard fucking no. For example, https://youtu.be/vFII7t9FtO8
Temu ? No, that's the structure of the whole chinese economy
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Chinese goods are heavily subsidized because the chinese state knows humans with free time and no money are an expensive liabiliry. They see busywork in itself as useful in itself, if it brings in any foreing currency on top, that's just gravy.
Humans are cheaper to replace than machines
Why ever buy from temu i'd never even install it or go to the site
i've worked in a few factories and this is not always true, especially with short runs.
to make a machine assemble a thousand things you gotta "tool up". that used to mean designing and building the tool that would do the repetitive motion but nowadays its just as much laying out gcode as it is figuring out how to make the more generalized machinery perform the specific tasks required for putting together some thing.
so take a computer mouse, there's like four parts. a usb wire, a circuit board, the bottom and the top. assembling the mouse is plugging the wire into the circuit board, aligning the board to the standoffs in either the top or bottom and make sure the wire is going out the hole then snap the top or bottom to it's counterpart then test.
probably fifteen seconds from parts to tested and ready for packing?
so in a thousand unit run you're looking at four and a quarter hours of human work. lets go ahead and round up to five, since someone is gonna have to set up our mouse assemblers bench, write out instructions, unpack the parts and dump them into bins, etc. it won't be 45 minutes of work, but more slop is better!
so for a thousand unit run you could pay your mouse assembler $15/hr and still only have 7.5c unit cost of assembly.
packing is another one that often gets done by people, but a mouse is pretty much wrap, tie, bag, box. maybe another fifteen seconds of labor, so add 7.5c onto your assembly and youre looking pretty good.
now your contract factory isn't gonna quote you what they think they can hit, they're gonna drag their laziest, slowest worker over to do the process five times, take the average and quote that. then they can charge you for ten hours when it only took five and pocket the difference. even then 30c per unit is most likely less than the robot equivalent.
just the cost of a quote to tool up for that run is maybe $50? free quotes weren't the norm domestically back in the day, but they were becoming more common overseas. then you've got the cost of the tooling (we'll keep ip like part layouts and gcode here) and the machine time itself!
there's also the actual injection molding of the top and bottom, making the cord, assembling the board, etc, but thats a whole nother conversation!
Temu is also shady about your data. So lol, you fucked yourself too.
Unless you've been a monk for the last 15 years your data's already out anyway
Even on Lemmy, everything you say is public and can be harvested pretty easily
TIL, posts that I post publicly and knowingly so, are the same as app that has 2 class-action lawsuits against them related to privacy and just had an event where they bought your likeness from you for 40bucks while advertising it as a "referral program" and the owner of the app had a malware infested App uploaded to the App Stores and with people claiming that their banking account information got leaked through the app.
Thanks! What would I do without the knowledge that you provided to me?
There is a difference between what I like to watch on YouTube and my banking information.
Edit: I forgot to mention that there is a law that forces Chinese companies to grant the Chinese state access to their computer systems. So everything, I said, plus a whole ass government (with more and less corrupt people) has your data!
On the edit part, I guess the same could be said about GAFAM and the US
Well, I don't wholely disagree but the laws are different and the application of the law is different.
But yeah, distrust is appropriate in both and all other case.
Does it matter how much the mouse cost? If my calculation is correct, expensive mouse price - reasonable wage is still < expensive mouse price - 0
G203 is my budget go to, prob still uses slave labour but they're Swiss so you'll never know
A relative was talking about ordering stuff from Temu. My response was that the products sold through them (they're just a marketplace) are so cheap that there's got to be slavery involved.
No it's like verified that they're using child slaves to make their products
From what I hear, it's also Chinese manufacturers trying to "break in" to the western market by initially operating at a loss. But I doubt how effective of a business strategy that would be, given that there is basically zero brand loyalty on marketplaces like temu. Am I getting my USB dongles from CKXLKY or TOPK? Fuck if I care! Idk tho, maybe the experience is different for people who buy stuff other than cheap electronics.
But yeah, there is 100% slavery involved. It's like the cacao/coffee/chocolate industries, down to the "don't blame us, we're just buying these goods at market prices, like everyone else" excuse. Brother, you are the one setting the market price.
My country made it illegal to sell at a loss (for that exact reason) and IIRC wish and/or temu got in some kind of legal trouble for it. So did IKEA when they tried to use their restaurant as a loss leader - illegal here!
Then there's the matter of shipping subsidies from the PRC, ain't no way cross-continent shipping is 0.02 € on a 5 € item for which the last mile is handled by the national postal service which I know for a fact charges anyone more than one euro for delivering a damn envelope.
Those reasons sound retarded. Having a loss leader product or line just means you are recouping it elsewhere. It's a draw-in, like $1.25 hotdogs at Costco. It's different than if your whole business operates at a loss for a certain time in order to squeeze out competition. The only way this would make even marginally sense is if say both IKEA and JYSK had a cafeteria and IKEA decided to sell food at a loss while JYSK would not be able to afford in that segment.
From what I know, it's not actually China subsidizing shipping, but the individual target countries instead, mostly on taxpayer money. This wouldn't be bad in practice, except that goods not originating from China do not have subsidized shipping, thus the unfair advantage.
I only buy my USB dongles from PUKEBONUR!
Ironically I have had good enough experiences with one or two Chinese brands to probably look at their stuff first whenever I ultimately replace/upgrade what I've got from them, but they certainly aren't the "spam random letters to game Amazon's systems" sort of brands and are really only slightly cheaper than the equivalents from elsewhere.
It's less a case of gaming Amazon, as it's a case of amazons systems making it easier to game the trademark office, than gaming Amazon.
Am I getting my USB dongles from CKXLKY or TOPK?
Actual laughing sounds came out of my mouth.
There are higher upfront costs with a robot, though, so if the volume is low human labor can make more sense.