On 21/02/2018 01:45, Ed Pawlowski wrote:

>
> The robots don't care where they are.Â* OTOH, look where the car makers
> have put up plants.Â* No new ones in Detroit, New York, or California.
> Mexico has some.

The robots may not care where they live but it still needs a large,
mainly unskilled or semi-skilled workforce to feed them and to perform
all the other tasks that currently cannot be assigned to robots.

The location of new assembly plants probably has more to do with who can
give the biggest grant or subsidy in the guise of regional aid for
deprived areas or just a government willing to forego taxes in order to
create jobs in n area.

I doubt if there are many car factories these days where a whole car is
manufactured on the premises. Often engines and gearboxes are
manufactured in a single plant and then shipped worldwide and the same
item ends up in many competing brands. In the past I have seen user
reviews where they claim that the power-train in brand X is a lot better
than that in brand Y whereas they are exactly the same.

It's much the same in other industries. How many companies actually make
the LCD screens for large screen TVs? How many consumer items are just
badged? Here in the UK well known brand names have been purchased to
allow the brand badge to be used on no-name electronics or other goods.
I'm aware of at least one item of electronics where the identical item
was sold under 4 different brand names, all at different prices, to
cater for those with brand loyalty and to fleece those who believe that
band A is better quality than brand B, even though brand B as an
independent company went bust a decade before.


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