Small note for a anyone on a similar path researching reliable China-based fulfillment for crowdfunding campaigns or ecommerce..
We have tested and physically inspected literally every major and minor Hong Kong and China fulfillment provider, and settled upon SPNS ( https://warehouse.expert ).
They are the only provider we found with western-education, that provide actual service (customer support, optimising routes and delivery companies, working directly with your end customer to reduce loss, fighting with couriers to negotiate refunds and insurance etc)
The guy heading up the operation is Victor, and can be contacted via team@spnslogistics.com
(Full disclosure: I am not associated with the company - but having spent years finding a decent solution am happy to share it)
Basically in China human manufacturing rules over all. Many westerners have misconceptions about automation in factories. Those fancy iPhone XR's? Assembled by Hand in China (with mechanical assistance) but still, assembled by Hand by real people.
China has way too high population for automation. If you call to build a factory, there will be millions of people wanting jobs. These jobs are not good jobs and are labour intensive, but the desire for jobs outweighs any other concern.
I was struck by this when I went to visit Shanghai in 2002. I was sitting beside a recent MBA grad who was originally from China.
We got to talking. At one point in the conversation he asked me a hypothetical question about how I would design a system to determine traffic conditions. I responded with an answer laying out cameras at intersections and software to make sense of the video.
He responded that in China they’d just put a person at every intersection who would send a text message to a team of humans who would update a webpage. It drove home the point to me that labour was so abundant and cheap there that you could often throw more bodies at the problem instead of writinf software... and probably solve the problem better.
China is interesting from this respect, there are so many people, and it is in the government's best interest to keep the citizens employed and happy and therefore there is a lot of "useless" jobs like the one you mention. The first time I visited I was shocked at the number of people employed to man the tollbooths and the number of people working in every restaurant until I realized why.
it is in the government's best interest to keep the citizens employed and happy and therefore there is a lot of "useless" jobs like the one you mention.
What is useless to one man is a lifeline to another.
I saw a documentary on NHK, and one of the points it made is that there are millions and millions and millions of people in China who need a job — any job — just to put food on the table. These are people who are so poor and poorly educated that they don't even know how to write their own names. Signatures are done with a fingerprint in red ink.
This one guy was so very happy to be employed full-time clearing sidewalks. With a broom made of twigs during the warm months, and with the same broom made of twigs to slowly clear deep snow in the cold months. But he was employed, by an organization that will pay him regularly and won't cheat him on his wages. So he's grateful to be better off than most of the other people he knows.
Those people don't need jobs, they need money. If your system is autocratic enough to just "create" jobs out of nothing, it could also give everybody a stipend. That's just not how they want to do it.
Employment helps social stability but money-only doesn't. While stipend for low-incomers also exists in China, gov really wants more people earn a living through working. IMO, the benefits are: 1. It puts people into time schedules, not floating around. 2. Makes them integrated into a "work community". 3. These jobs still help, not purely "created". 4. Employer will have some insurances and coverages.
Over years I agree that many jobs diminished with the introduction of machines (vacuum trucks, etc.). It would be a tough job for the government to find more positions in this kind.
This is a worthwhile point really - job scheduling is a good way to pacify a population, which helps everyone. Having people hanging around bored is one of the sure-fire ways to get unrest.
seems to have helped everyone in this board during yours childhood and teen years, when you could just play games and learn to code, which became most people here trade. but yeah, if you missed that by not being born rich, work until your back break, to build character or some other bs.
Or, you could simply pay everyone a stipend and then drug them into barely functional stupors for 10 hours a day.
Same result.
The missed point in "someone spending time on a meaningless job promotes social stability" is that you're forcing (via money and requiring same for sustenance) an individual to spend most of their life in a meaningless way in order to survive.
Is it a solution to resolving social unrest? Yes.
But let's not kid ourselves about what's actually being done.
* To say nothing of the argument that by artificially depressing wages you make your economy dependent on manual labor, limiting re-investment in automation, thereby eventually dooming yourself when other countries have cheaper labor / cost-effective automation
The CCP does a really good job at keeping (enough) of the populace happy so that there is little to no risk of unrest that could affect their power. A main pillar of this is the social benefits of having people employed in particular your points 1 and 2.
Plus they have a really really big stick they don’t hestitate to use. It’s not all carrot by any means, it’s more along the lines of “plomo o plata” with a demonstrable history of going massively overboard with the lead.
In my opinion it's more about removing 'rabble rousers' than keeping people happy. We have a lot of internal strife in the US, but I'd be extremely surprised if all of the upset and discontent was not being fomented by something like 0.1% of the population. This is one thing that bothers me. I value free speech above all, but that comes at a massive price since it, without doubt, can have a major and negative destabilizing force on a nation. Perhaps the solution is not having nations with hundreds of millions of people under one government.
The US grew "organically" into what it is today. The population leans left in more urban areas, and leans right in more rural areas, to varying degrees. This doesn't lend itself to a geographical solution.
I don't think a solution to internal disagreements can or should exist.
I'm not sure what's happened in the US has been entirely organic. There is a tremendous amount to be politically gained by dividing people. Imagine I'm a politician who cares nothing at all except about staying in power. One way to do this is to just do a really good job. But doing a good job is hard, and even harder when I'd like to taste of the fruits of my power on occasion, which tend to make people a bit upset. What am I to do? It's not hard. I completely remove myself from the picture. Instead if I can people completely fear, despise, and hate the other side as much as I possibly can - it works just as well. If I can make people think any alternative to me is just simply evil incarnate, then I can do whatever I want. People will still elect me because I'm 'better than the alternative', an alternative which I make sure becomes reprehensible. I can pick issues that aren't necessarily that important, but do a great job of dividing people - and just focus all my efforts on dividing people along these issues.
And this isn't a one side or the other thing. Division benefits both sides, and so playing up to their villainy works in a nice symbiotic relationship. Both sides in office are playing the exact same game, and they play it very well. There was an email from the DNC leaks from Bill Ivey, former chairman of the national endowment for the arts, to John Podesta [1]. I think he phrased things quite succinctly, "We've all been quite content to demean government, drop civics and in general conspire to produce an unaware and compliant citizenry. The unawareness remains strong but compliance is obviously fading rapidly. This problem demands some serious, serious thinking - and not just poll driven, demographically-inspired messaging.".
How many people voted for Clinton thinking, "Yes - I think this politician is somebody that stands for what I truly value and will make a very good president." How many people voted for her because the alternative was completely unthinkable? And similarly for Trump voters. It's not really a conspiracy so much as the fact that politicians obviously have massive full time teams working to min-max elections, and it turns out that getting people really pissed at each other is apparently one of the best ways to do that.
Rather than just any old divisions, politics is increasingly steered toward divisions over things that elites don't actually care about: gun rights, abortion rights, LGBTQ rights, manufactured "religious freedom" debates, "tough on crime" policies, etc.
These things actually are important, because regular people do have strong feelings about them, but they matter to elites only to the extent that they can be used to gin up votes without having to dissent on any of the things that they all agree on: killing lots of foreigners with expensive weapons systems, preventing anything resembling a realistic safety net, pro-capital/anti-labor tax and immigration policies, unlimited dark money in politics, etc.
First-past-the-post systems like the US make this particularly easy, since third parties have no chance. If policies like universal healthcare and non-interventionist foreign policy are simply never adopted by either party, voters are forced to make their voting choice based on things that at least are different between the two parties, and elites have arranged for these to be things that barely matter to them at all. They don't have to interact with our barely-there social safety net, worry about health insurance, send their sons to die in foreign wars, or tolerate any of the daily parade of indignities that constitute life for working people.
In short, it's good strategy to manipulate the poors with cheap rhetoric about the 2nd amendment, so that you don't have to have messy debates about expensive things the elites oppose, like universal healthcare.
Humans are bad at doing nothing. Something like basic income will definitely be needed in the future, but there's something to be said for the "dignity of work."
Even if it's something like "10 hours of community service per week in exchange for basic income," contributing something to their tribe or society is an important part of a complete human being.
I agree, but it's not either/or. Some people will probably earn their basic income+extra doing science/engineering/etc, some will do art, and some will do the bare minimum.
If we successfully decouple work from sustenance, I'm pretty sure there will be a non-negligable percentage of humans who would just take the basic income and passively consume. However, letting a person consume without any "skin in the game," I think would create a sense of entitlement among the bottom tiers, and resentment among the productive segments of society.
Also, there will still probably be a bunch of stuff that needs to get done cheaply (i.e. 100% automation is not practical), but not enough people want to do, like picking up trash, or cutting the grass, or sorting files at a courthouse.
I just don't see a world where everyone does exactly what they want to do at all times forever, unless we build personal VR universes for everyone.
Also, I've spent a good deal of time thinking recently about how to quantify art and other "indirect" contributions to society under a basic income system. Like if there's any work requirement, even if it's minimal, how much art qualifies? A couple of doodles? Could I just randomly scribble some blotches on canvas and call it a week of work? Could there be enough qualified art judges to determine if everyone who will inevitably try to phone it in has contributed "enough?"
I don't know. This came out kind of rambly, but there's a lot of non-binary, non-obvious aspects to basic income, and I've struggled to find answers to a lot of the questions I've come up with.
Ultimately, I agree with you. The system should support people contributing in the way the enjoy the most.
> Could I just randomly scribble some blotches on canvas and call it a week of work?
if you had to qualify your art with somebody to receive the benefit of the basic income, then it's not basic income. Art should be for art's sake - the artists themselves know if they are making art (they can't lie to themselves).
There should really be no obligation to work, and if those who don't feel like working (to produce anything, art included), they should be free _not_ to. Basic income should cover the bare minimum of living expenses. The incentive to work/produce should be an innate desire for more than the basic income. Society should encourage it, but not force it.
Some people need a task, not everyone has the desire to pursue artistic endeavors. It's part of the reason you see trust fund babies that are borderline useless human beings. They've got everything in the world besides a reason to get up in the morning...
Right; I'm convinced that a basic income has to be paired with some social contract, to replace the feeling of being usefully employed. Else we get restless people. How about a requirement to be socially involved, as a mentor or club member or team member or something that gets you out and contributing. Event just to a team or family.
Basic income requires mandatory colonization draft enrollment.
Or in Heinlein's words, re: citizenship:
"Under our system every voter and officeholder is a man who has demonstrated through voluntary and difficult service that he places the welfare of the group ahead of personal advantage."
You could think of the job as the means to distribute wealth and keep people happy, and getting a task done is just the means to that end.
In the scenario where we replace them with software that wealth travels upward instead of downward along the social and wealth ladder and you have citizens with nmidle hands.
Normally I would say investment in infrastructure is a good way to make that happen but China is no slouch in that regard either. They just have an unfathomable amount of people.
It’s useless because you don’t think of social cost because you’re probably a middle class professional. We’re all a type of factory drone optimizing capital allocation.
End of the day, our policy of exporting value from the United States will come home to roost. When I was a kid in the 90s, you worked at fast food or restaurants and often hung out there too. Now most of those jobs are filled by more easily exploitable immigrants, and slowly but surely those jobs are attriting away too.
It's the same here in India too. People manning toll booth, security at malls, airports and other seemingly useless tasks that can be automated easily, are kept on because a) it's cheaper, and b) employment
Well, our city (far smaller than Shanghai) has installed few devices to monitoring traffic jam many years ago, probably because nobody actually wants to take stand beside a road for a whole day as a carrier.
It's very interesting point, but not just because abundant and cheap I think.
I was discuss a potential business model with my boss years ago for fun. It's about a breakfast deliver service. My point was, if we have enough data, then we can optimize the process so we can deliver all the breakfasts in the time window (to make sure people can get their breakfasts once they wake up in the morning, and the food itself is still in the "best by" time when they enjoying it)
My boss ask me back "Why would you think those delivery staffs cannot figure it out by themselves?"
Sometime we just forgot how flexible and intelligence human labors can be, and that level of flexible and intelligence is something current automation still can't bring to the real world.
I have a friend who's running an ads optimization startup. His words: "We are an artificial intelligence company, in which "artificial" comes first and "intelligence" comes second...
He's running two divisions, one employs experienced "ads buyers", one tries to tune models to catch up with the former. :P
> If you call to build a factory, there will be millions of people wanting jobs. These jobs are not good jobs and are labour intensive, but the desire for jobs outweighs any other concern.
China actually has labor shortages in certain places at certain times, yes, even for those factories. Also, wages have been going up, meaning labor is getting more expensive as surpluses are tapped out. It isn’t infinite, especially in 2018 compared to 1998.
Add on to that china’s coming demographic cliff, and automation is obviously going to have to make up the difference.
This is a very western oriented viewpoint. If it comes to that, the Chinese solution is not automation. It's to allow more marriages and have more children.
Revise the now defunct childbirth policy to lean the other way (ie social program to have more kids) and China can have a fertility spurt that can increase the size of the country by two or three US's in 2 generations. There's the labour to take care of the demographic cliff. They can also be ready work in healthcare to take care of the aging population in about 15-18 years.
> Basically in China human manufacturing rules over all. Many westerners have misconceptions about automation in factories.
Many westerners are unhappy because globalization has caused a loss of manufacturing jobs. People elsewhere in the thread say that the Chinese government encourages using a lot of human labor in order to foster social order. Maybe so, or maybe they don't need to, because labor is so cheap anyway. Certainly the Japanese government does it, since labor is not cheap there.
But Western governments are more efficient. They don't have to make sure people have jobs: they can just tell people that those jobs went away because of automation, not globalization. People won't complain too much, they know they can't fight technology.
And that's where the misconception comes from. Basically in the West labor arbitrage rules over all.
I often wonder about the short term impact of efforts to drive employment conditions and pay of these jobs to more 'western' standards. What happens when a factory is built on the edge of a small town and the starting salary and working conditions are better than 75% of the jobs in the region?
I'm sure there's a 'rising tide raises all ships' element and the long term effects would have to be beneficial. But in the short term i wonder if there's a labor drain/golden handcuffs effect.
Not just automation, but some industrialization, too. I was shocked to watch them build railroads, essentially by hand. One Dutch guy was working the surveying tools, and a translator stood next to him, shouting out the orders. What appeared to be about 30 people straddling railroad rails, lifted up the rails using wood and strap lifts. Hard to explain, but they basically just used a whole lot of people to lay rails.
I asked our fixer what the story was, and it was similar to what's written here. If you want to use a machine, you have to buy the machine from the US. That's expensive, and people in China are cheap. Then you have to pay someone to run the machine, and that person costs 20x what the cheap labor does. Then when the machine breaks, you can't get anything done (and you have to pay someone even more expensive to fix it). When the cheap labor can no longer work, you just replace...them.
He said that the large companies got paid rebates for each person they hired (or something to that effect). It happens in tech, too. Not much in the way of build automation, but lots of people running around datacenters with DVD's and USB sticks.
In short, it keeps people busy and lessens the chance of uprisings (which is a thing in China).
Fascinating the first image that pops into my mind is the building of US railroads and what a bad rap American business owners get for using slave labor. I don't know much about the period but wonder if one man's slave laborer is another man's very low wage but grateful laborer.
Humans are the most flexible and reconfigurable system for assembly. They can identify and deal with near infinite variations in position and condition of your inputs. If you look at automated assembly like 3/4 of the automation is to make sure the robot has the pieces is in the right place or orientation and the movements that are used are not complicated. Meanwhile for a human you can toss a bag of parts and they'll just fish through the bag or reoriented whatever as needed. Put a piece sideways into a machine that wasn't made to deal with it and it'll just flip out. Also reconfiguring assembly lines on the fly is feasible, change what the line is doing could be as easy as workers grabbing a different tool box. Fixed assembly lines are only good at scale and if the product will change incredibly slowly.
I worry about the extent to which too-cheap labor night slow the development of labor-saving technology. It's ultimately this technology that improves per-capita productivity and keeps us ahead of Malthus. In an environment where you can throw bodies at problems, why bother with more-expensive automation?
Some people say that The Roman Empire - had it lasted without any Dark Age - could have given us mobile phones 1000 years ago. Some others say that it wouldn’t have happened, because they had too many slaves and cheap (or free) labor disincentivized optimizations and technology investments.
Cheap labor is the same reason why many businesses boom in China but not so much in US/Europe. Take food delivery for example, $10 worth of food costs $1 delivery fee in China while it costs $7 to deliver on ubereats here in the US.
A lot of that also comes down to labor costs. It's easy to forget how much of a chain there is in any product. That fruit you buy at the supermarket has people plant it, grow it, harvest it, clean it, 'package'/label it, transport it, stock it, sell it, bag it. And at each step along the line there are often numerous business to business, administrative, and other costs that need to be covered. And of course there tends to be a thousand different government rules, regulations, fees, and other costs involved along the line.
Cheap labor also makes it much easier for independent businesses to open, which helps increase competition and keep prices low. In the US the fees you have to pay just to try to start a business would be more than enough to pay for months for labor. In the US you'll rarely find a middle class neighbor owning a business with a retail front, whereas in many parts of Asia it's quite common: low costs, though low profit.
Something I love, and hate, about Asia in general is you can walk into a store and suddenly you'll have half a dozen employees circling about trying to help. Since labor costs don't kill companies, they tend to be much less concerned about running on the bare minimum skeleton crew to keep things chugging along, and I think that's good for everybody. On the other hand that also has the dark side of the out of sight conditions that plague the bottom tier of employees. There's a give and take to all decisions.
Like a dear friend here in Shanghai says, the highly efficient delivery system will break down when labor decides they don't want to work for a pittance a day. Doesn't look like any day soon.
This is a lovely marketing piece. Great story, and hammers home the drive to quality, which of course backs up the brand. And it's a story of triumph over adversity, which makes you root for the little guy (or girl, in this case).
> " Chili supplier and blend: I found a supplier who stone-grinds their dried chilis the traditional way rather than using a machine, which retains the luster, natural oils and bright red color that I needed the sauce to have."
This sounds remarkably similar to the problem faced by people who are into seriously expensive coffee. Basically, a "conical burr" grinder crushes the beans together, whereas a cheap spinning blade type grinder chops them apart into flaky bits. The former is strongly preferred by coffee snobs, and the use of the latter is seen as barely better than buying preground coffee.
My theory is that the stone part is actually not essential, but it's the crushing/grinding mechanism that preserves the oil and luster (could be done equally well with stainless steel), whereas some sort of shredding blade allows too much of the oils to escape.
At the higher end of coffee, there's a big debate about whether conical or flat burrs are better. The absolute top of the line grinders (at $2k) have both options:
https://www.kafatek.com/
When most peoole cook at home, all they're doing is shoddy chemistry with bad lab equipment.
Getting slightly better equipment is the best way to improve your cooking or make anything the same way more than once.
Want to remember an exact reduction for a sauce? Use a refractometer and record the results. Want to scale a recipe easily? Covert it to % soln or mass/mass (see baker's ratio).
I wonder if/how you would do any kind of continuous testing with food/aromatic products like this. Have a taste panel on site? Do some basic go/no go tests for what, pH, viscosity, gas chromatograph (lol?).
The Sriracha company doesn't try too hard to make each batch identical from their FAQ - just the variation in chiles alone make that impossible except within a 55 gallon mix, it sounds like it would not be possible without using a lot of additional ingredients to smooth out the flavor between batches like companies do with orange juice.
They don't make identical batches, most of the chiles they get come from 1 time of the year.
They preblend a 55 gallon mix (Its their chile paste you can buy at the grocery store) and use that production stock for the rest of the year. They add some additives / flavors etc to make the actual srircha afterwards. Srircha only carries 3 products, chile paste, chile paste with garlic, and srircha.
Factory tour was worth it, I had to plan a month in advance but it was really cool to see. Especially how many 55 gallon jugs they store in their warehouse.
I don't know what the exact testing method they used for quality control, that part of factory was off limits and they didn't explain it either
I guess at some point you just trust the ingredients and process? I’m all for variability, it makes life interesting. But if your responsibility it to make sure that everyone buying Sriracha gets what they paid for, what do you do? 55 gallons is a lot of sauce, but if you empty 300 times that into clear plastic bottles every day, that’s a lot of taste testing.
Statistical process control is really fascinating stuff. You have to test often enough to have reasonable confidence, but not so much that you waste time and energy.
There's an interesting video with Alan Alda showing how McCormick calibrated pepper heat in the... late 80s? early 90s? https://youtu.be/Hd_mxyMAJJY?t=215
Just inside of Europe the taste difference is super obvious. E.g. it's clearly sweeter in Sweden than Germany. That could just be a difference in carbonation though.
Also, for the zero calorie drinks the sweeteners used vary.
A can of coke is the same everywhere. Fountain cola varies wildly since restaurants use different levels of carbonation, syrup and freshness. McDonalds fountain coke is the best.
Between countries, a can of Coca Cola varies[1], particularly in the amount of sugar[2], as well as the type (HFCS in the US, cane or beet sugar in most other places).
Well ackshully, It's getting popular in America to get "Mexican Coke" (which is bottled, not canned so your point can still stand) because it can use cane sugar instead of HFCS:
Making large batches of food homogeneous is super hard. It is hard enough to do it in small batches, but when you scale up the processes gravity really becomes your enemy.
For the automated filling I would look at using a spout with a shaker attached to it that can measure off a very precise amount of granular material without getting clogged.
Finally, nobody seems to be wearing either latex gloves or masks in any of the photos, that may be to make the photos nicer but it is not how you run a proper food packaging chain that has humans in the loop.
Great post! I’ve seen the hardware side of manufacturing and also been amazed at how hard packaging / filling is when my ex launched a hair care line... her conditioner was also too viscous to go through the factory nozzles :/
The writing skill speaks for itself. I followed every single link she included, and was utterly engaged by every word and entry.
I suppose there is also the aspect that she is engaging different types of readers (foodies, techies, entrepreneurs, etc), but honestly I was ready to buy the sauce three paragraphs into my first read.
My biggest lesson and cautionary tale after launching a professional services company in Shanghai, think English resume editing, LinkedIn Profiles creation, interview coaching and academic entrance services, is to to pick your partners very carefully. There is an infuriating aspect to contracts here where upon signature, the real negotiations on terms begins, even for the simplest points. Be prepared to spend inordinate time on what would be obvious and elementary in the U.S.
I think the author just underestimates Chinese ingenuity when it comes to counterfeit goods. There's more to just spoofing the label. There's also naming, pricing, etc.
there are already tons of established brands for this product in China, so I don't think anyone in China would even trust her genuine product, let alone try to counterfeit it for domestic market
let's better not tell her to read Poorly made in China if she thinks her product will have same ingredients/formula after few months of production, that book perfectly describe daily Chinese reality/mentality if you are interested, can confirm it as someone who worked there for years. for starters any contract it's useless piece of paper
You find some people in your city who used to work in China, talk to them, hear how hard sourcing and quality control was and probably give up. Or you find those people on LinkedIn but this stuff is hard for people who really understand China. Making the right connections is hard, staying on top of communications is hard, quality control is comically hard.
It depends on the product. In general, you can either do it yourself, contract out sub-assemblies and perform final assembly, or give it to a factory with related experience and have them execute. With simple products like this, you are better off taking option #3 .. it saves a lot of overhead with respect to legals, financials, setup, etc.
We have tested and physically inspected literally every major and minor Hong Kong and China fulfillment provider, and settled upon SPNS ( https://warehouse.expert ).
They are the only provider we found with western-education, that provide actual service (customer support, optimising routes and delivery companies, working directly with your end customer to reduce loss, fighting with couriers to negotiate refunds and insurance etc)
The guy heading up the operation is Victor, and can be contacted via team@spnslogistics.com
(Full disclosure: I am not associated with the company - but having spent years finding a decent solution am happy to share it)