i watched a show called "how it's made" tonight, and i was impressed at the automation in a pringles factory.
the factory is totally automated, and trucks back n and tip their dirty potatoes into a chute, and the potatoes get washed automatically, and they get peeled automatically, and they get sliced automatically, and all the slices get scanned by a scanner that decides whether the slices are adequate, and if a slice is not adequate (due to color or size) then it is blown off the conveyer belt.
the slices that are accepted continue along the conveyer, and they are dropped into a vat of boiling oil, and cooked for 3 minutes.
then they are lifted onto another conveyer belt that carries them to an area where they are scanned again and a machine collects them into bundles of 64, and ferries them to another area which intersects with the packaging side of the factory that makes the boxes for them.
but the process is then slowed savagely in a bottleneck because there are humans who put the pringles into their boxes.
i started to laugh at the fact that they had not automated the part of the factory that packaged the pringles into their boxes. it seems like such an easy step to automate, and yet they had not yet done it.
then i thought that possibly they are required to keep some laborers in the process of making pringles so as to not put every one of the labouroers in the factory out of work.
how draconian.
it is hilarious to me that there is an efficient production line that bottle necks around a forced human element that is required by law to remain employed.