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0 pointsMrTonyD10y ago0 comments

You shouldn't have been downvoted. I was in a fully automated "lights out" factory producing PCs. Big trucks came up to the doors where the components (produced by robots in other factories) were unloaded by robots and passed from robot to robot until the entire machine was assembled. Once fully debugged, the entire factory was moved offshore to be owned by a group of the executives who would be able to sell to the company and hide all the income from taxation (the group included executives from "competing" companies to avoid any legal issues of "self-dealing".) So the billionaires made more billions by selling at high prices to our society while hiding their income.

I should add that they didn't automate boxing the computers, so that they could have a few people work each day doing boxing. We used low-cost humans (with degrees!) to box just to double check to make sure we were running the right products as scheduled for the factory. We could have automated that, too, but people are cheap. (Contrary to the beliefs of many, we more often stopped automation projects due to workers being too cheap to bother replacing, not because it was too hard to automate the job.)

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lifeisstillgood10y ago· 2 in thread

I think it's different that a) we (you?) can build a robot factory to make stuff and b) we let them use it as a tax dodge

Fixing the tax system is a different problem, but no less complex - but cool factory.

MrTonyDOP10y ago

Good point. From my perspective, the major problem with free trade is that it lets the billionaires move production offshore and avoid all taxes while hiding their obscene profits. (And they then import the products while laying-off US employees.)(And the guy who owned the factory, let's call him "Steve", made many billions offshore for which there is no US accounting at all.)

And it was a very cool factory - I had done automation projects, and some buddies of mine at the company were working on that project. As someone who had done robotic automation, it was truly amazing to watch and was probably the most state of the art at the time. We literally turned out the lights just to stand on the catwalk and watch the robots in the glow of the hundreds of LEDs on the electronics.

lifeisstillgood10y ago

That's not free trades problem - that's this problem

Apple sells a million iPhones in Europe and now has a billion Euros in bank accounts in 23 countries. Which of the following statements is true:

Apple is a US company so USA should get the tax on that billion

Apple has the money in a German bank account so Germany gets to tax it first

Apple used sales people in Ireland to take the order on the phone, so Irish gov gets to tax it

Ten thousand iPhones were sold to Dutch citizens and shipped from France to NL. By a UK shipper. We all want a cut

It's a total fucking mess is what it is. In fact it reminds me of the BBC podcast Infinite Monkey Cage on race just now where the biologists just went "can we not use the word race, it is totally meaningless"

I suspect if you find a tax lawyer they have a similar view in "nation state" "soverignty" and "tax revenues"

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ghaff10y ago· 1 in thread

Datacenters are another example. Once they're built and turned on, my understanding is that they take maybe 35 permanent people to operate at the datacenter itself.

sithadmin10y ago

In the dozens of datacenters I've visited while working on projects for various clients, head counts are often far lower than 35.

In cases where the datacenter is being rented out to customers for colocation, the entire staff - which might be a dozen or less - is often working as glorified remote hands for an ops team located elsewhere.

I've also worked with a number of Fortune 1000s that have a sizable on-site datacenter footprint, but zero FTE resources dedicated to datacenter operations itself. Everything is divvied up among existing groups (facilities, IT ops, security, etc.), and occasional projects (structured cabling, rack and stack, etc.) are outsourced.

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