Well, there was a TV show on Discovery in at least the Netherlands, called Megafactories, is this really that much larger? Car plants are pretty large as they go already.
So, after some DDGing, the biggest car plant is Volkswagens' in Wolfsburg, Germany [0] at 6.5 million square meters, while Giga nevada has 11.5 million square meters [1], so twice the size. So it's big, but to go from mega to giga, you'd really need a 1000x increase, rather than a mere 2x increase :-).
The Northvolt facility does not qualify for the Giga-prefix IMHO.
I remember watching an episode of NatGeo's "Megafactories" showing a Coca-cola plant that could run a massive operation with only 17 employees. Everything beautifully orchestrated, everything so optimized. Yet, hardly what someone would say "the best allocation of time and resources that need optimizing".
Is society better off because this plant managed to reduce its unit production cost by 0.05%, or have we just ensured that we can keep getting cheap unhealthy sugared-water for a little while longer? Was any person that lost that job due to the automation now going to take the time to improve/acquire their professional skills and go on to work on better jobs, or did we just send someone to either welfare or some crappy gig-economy job?
If it was "just a game", sure, go ahead and enjoy it. But I would bet that a lot of people playing the game take some of its lessons and strategies as a model of how to behave at work in real life. And in real life engineers and executives should be able to ask themselves "Why am I optimizing this?", "Why do we need a perfect ratio?" and have answers that go beyond "it looks good on a spreadsheet"
Hacker Cinema
2 comments on Hacker News
Well, there was a TV show on Discovery in at least the Netherlands, called Megafactories, is this really that much larger? Car plants are pretty large as they go already.
So, after some DDGing, the biggest car plant is Volkswagens' in Wolfsburg, Germany [0] at 6.5 million square meters, while Giga nevada has 11.5 million square meters [1], so twice the size. So it's big, but to go from mega to giga, you'd really need a 1000x increase, rather than a mere 2x increase :-).
The Northvolt facility does not qualify for the Giga-prefix IMHO.
[0] https://motoroctane.com/news/213409-largest-car-factories-world. This page actually positions Giga Nevada at a lower rank, so probably outdated
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giga_Nevada
> planning, optimising, getting perfect ratios,
At the expense of what? Optimizing for what?
I remember watching an episode of NatGeo's "Megafactories" showing a Coca-cola plant that could run a massive operation with only 17 employees. Everything beautifully orchestrated, everything so optimized. Yet, hardly what someone would say "the best allocation of time and resources that need optimizing".
Is society better off because this plant managed to reduce its unit production cost by 0.05%, or have we just ensured that we can keep getting cheap unhealthy sugared-water for a little while longer? Was any person that lost that job due to the automation now going to take the time to improve/acquire their professional skills and go on to work on better jobs, or did we just send someone to either welfare or some crappy gig-economy job?
If it was "just a game", sure, go ahead and enjoy it. But I would bet that a lot of people playing the game take some of its lessons and strategies as a model of how to behave at work in real life. And in real life engineers and executives should be able to ask themselves "Why am I optimizing this?", "Why do we need a perfect ratio?" and have answers that go beyond "it looks good on a spreadsheet"