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Factories are just rooms

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Re: Factories are just rooms

#121

Post by fragmede »

close04 wrote: post #119
fragmede wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One man could not make an ordinary #2 pencil. A modern lathe was already out of reach.

I wanted to say that lathes have been around for over 2000 years and for most of that time a single well trained man could build one. In fact I’d wager that most lathes and indeed maybe even every part of that lathe up until the industrial revolution were built by a person working alone. The advanced machines of today are no longer within reach for almost any single well trained man. Now it takes an army of people wi…

Could build a lathe from parts they could purchase, but not from scratch. The simple ballpoint pen is an absolute marvel of precision engineering that we take utterly for granted. That ball in the tip? Not something you could knock out in a weekend by hand. Even wire itself as a basic component is freaking impossible to feasibly do from scratch compared to going down to the hardware store and spending $5 for a spool. That I can also get a microcontroller devkit that's impossible for me to recreate from a local store is mind-blowing, if we stop to think about it.

Re: Factories are just rooms

#122

Post by markemer »

Animats wrote: post #73
ChuckMcM wrote: post #35

I find it interesting how far we've come so far from the mindset of "You can do that." There was a hilariously funny reddit post about someone who discovered that you could just blend peanuts and it would make peanut butter. But there was sadness there too. All of my kids spent hours pouring over a book we had called 'The Way Things Work' with a delightfully funny Mammoth and a good description of how things actually…

> When I was a kid I was amazed that people like Edison and Tesla had labs not filled with gear from some lab manufacturer, but stuff they built themselves from first principles. Edison did not build his stuff himself. Edison had people building stuff for him. More people as his career progressed. His lead machinist was John Kreusi.[1] Kruesi personally built the first Edison light bulb and the first phonograph. Krue…

You’d be surprised how much that still happens. In my research clean room in grad school we used to have to build machines ourselves all the time. Not from first principles mind you, but we did have a machine shop and had to make all sorts of stuff. When it’s never been done before, you’re kinda on your own, machine wise.

Re: Factories are just rooms

#123

Post by markemer »

gumby wrote: post #67
ChuckMcM wrote: post #35

I find it interesting how far we've come so far from the mindset of "You can do that." There was a hilariously funny reddit post about someone who discovered that you could just blend peanuts and it would make peanut butter. But there was sadness there too. All of my kids spent hours pouring over a book we had called 'The Way Things Work' with a delightfully funny Mammoth and a good description of how things actually…

> When I was a kid I was amazed that people like Edison and Tesla had labs not filled with gear from some lab manufacturer, but stuff they built themselves from first principles. Most chem labs re still like this — ours certainly is. Certain instruments you might buy (gas chromatograph, micrometer) but it’s hardly unusual to find them adapted as well. There’s lots of blue tape in the fume hood too. And our prototypes…

Yeah, research in general. Sometimes the thing you want just doesn’t exist. The story of the blue LED is like one guy with a CVD machine he could adapt with great precision because it was the only thing it had.

Re: Factories are just rooms

#124

Post by ChuckMcM »

Xirdus wrote: post #118
rauljordan2020 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an incredibly impactful childhood. I'm from Honduras, a developing country where there is practically zero investment in science or the arts, and I was fortunate enough to also have gotten a similar book. One thing that struck me is how not a single person around me ever conceived of the things we use and consume on a daily basis as having been created by someone...another human being with our same physical f…

This kinda sounds like some middle ground between forced modernization of Eastern European countries (this isn't our tech but we could make it ourselves if we wanted to but we don't want to because it would be inferior) and the cargo cults of the Pacific islands (technology literally comes from the sky). I kinda wish somebody made some study of how different ways societies acquire technology impacts the given society…

While difficult to control (as a study) it would probably be a solid basis for a PhD in anthropology or sociology. If you could compare two cultures, one which was exposed to the knowledge of how the technology came to be, and one which was simply allowed to buy the technology they wanted, over the next 30 - 50 years how does it change the group. If we ever were visited by extra-terrestrials this would probably be something they had already studied :-).

Re: Factories are just rooms

#125

Post by Animats »

markemer wrote: post #122
Animats wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When I was a kid I was amazed that people like Edison and Tesla had labs not filled with gear from some lab manufacturer, but stuff they built themselves from first principles. Edison did not build his stuff himself. Edison had people building stuff for him. More people as his career progressed. His lead machinist was John Kreusi.[1] Kruesi personally built the first Edison light bulb and the first phonograph. Krue…

You’d be surprised how much that still happens. In my research clean room in grad school we used to have to build machines ourselves all the time. Not from first principles mind you, but we did have a machine shop and had to make all sorts of stuff. When it’s never been done before, you’re kinda on your own, machine wise.

In industry, you usually have professional machinists and toolmakers doing much of that. They're better at it than grad students.

I once worked at an R&D facility for heavy hydraulic equipment. It looked like a factory with an office section, but only made and tested prototypes. The production plants were elsewhere. About three quarters of the workforce were factory workers, good ones. Engineers did not operate lathes. That was prohibited by union rules.

Re: Factories are just rooms

#126

Post by torginus »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #25
AnotherGoodName wrote: post #14

This is from someone that has observed Shenzen. A location where much is made in garage sized factories (usually literally a garage space at ground level where people will bang out products by hand). You might not expect a bespoke 2 ton electric train engine to be made in a series of garages but it really is. One lot of workers will be experts at winding coils. They'll have a rig that spins and a spool of copper to w…

Certain industries such as film adjacent industries definitely remind me of what you are describing. Small scale, small shop, profound expertise, able to immediately work and iterate. And the way they solve healthcare is simple. They don’t offer health insurance benefits at all. Employees buy it for themselves from Covered California.

Yeah I have a friend who does this as a livng, and it sounds insane. They do stuff like where a director approves a piece of concept art for a prop, before he gets on the plane for a 12 hour flight for the shoot.

In the available time, they have to model, 3D print, paint and wire up every piece art, so by the time the director gets there, its ready for the shoot. There's no room for mistakes, as each of these processes takes long enough that a repeat is not feasible.

Yet everything he does works, and he does it every time. Even if I pulled off that stuff once in the amount of time given, it would be something I kept bragging about for the rest of my life.

Re: Factories are just rooms

#127

Post by mlinhares »

rauljordan2020 wrote: post #91
ChuckMcM wrote: post #35

I find it interesting how far we've come so far from the mindset of "You can do that." There was a hilariously funny reddit post about someone who discovered that you could just blend peanuts and it would make peanut butter. But there was sadness there too. All of my kids spent hours pouring over a book we had called 'The Way Things Work' with a delightfully funny Mammoth and a good description of how things actually…

This is an incredibly impactful childhood. I'm from Honduras, a developing country where there is practically zero investment in science or the arts, and I was fortunate enough to also have gotten a similar book. One thing that struck me is how not a single person around me ever conceived of the things we use and consume on a daily basis as having been created by someone...another human being with our same physical f…

> but my culture is too preoccupied with petty gossip of what others think and third world consumerism traps that prevent any kind of development

Your culture is the outcome of colonization, dictatorships propped up by first world powers, and being ruled by the same families that came with the Spanish 500 years ago.

Might be worth it to also invest time in reading another book, like "Open Veins of Latin America", to understand the realities of what happened to Latin American countries in general, so you stop repeating stuff like that.

Re: Factories are just rooms

#128

Post by close04 »

fragmede wrote: post #121
close04 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wanted to say that lathes have been around for over 2000 years and for most of that time a single well trained man could build one. In fact I’d wager that most lathes and indeed maybe even every part of that lathe up until the industrial revolution were built by a person working alone. The advanced machines of today are no longer within reach for almost any single well trained man. Now it takes an army of people wi…

Could build a lathe from parts they could purchase, but not from scratch. The simple ballpoint pen is an absolute marvel of precision engineering that we take utterly for granted. That ball in the tip? Not something you could knock out in a weekend by hand. Even wire itself as a basic component is freaking impossible to feasibly do from scratch compared to going down to the hardware store and spending $5 for a spool.…

2000 years ago the person who was capable enough to think of and build a lathe didn’t go to order the pieces. They modeled the raw materials (wood, metal, stone) into what they needed. But let me give you a less debatable example. Watch makers or even the people who built the Antikythera mechanism didn’t go to the cog and sprocket store to get the parts. They manufactured the components from the raw material or as close to it as possible. They probably built their own tools to for the longest time.

And when I said pen I meant fountain pen. It’s counterintuitive but probably more people today can draw a conceptual diagram of a ballpoint than a fountain pen. Ballpoints are a very simple design limited only by the very tight tolerances need to make them work.

But that was my whole point, complexity got so high that most things around us cannot be built without specialized tools, specialized building blocks, and specialized knowledge that takes years to gather. And this needs to be repeated for almost every object. Different tools, building blocks, and knowledge.

A highschooler today knows more chemistry than Mendeleev but that doesn’t help because the complexity in each field or product increases faster than one person’s ability to keep up with learning.

Re: Factories are just rooms

#129

Post by JacobAsmuth »

jimnotgym wrote: post #100
JacobAsmuth wrote: post #65

First line of the blog the author states they spoke to the "year group" - what is that? I'm not familiar with the term.

The group of children who are the same age. How that is organised into classes depends on how many kids there are. There may be several classes in each year, or like my little rural village school where each class had 2 year groups in it. In the UK state system you normally enter primary school at year 1, go to secondary school for year 7, leave secondary in year 11 (aged 16, or 15 if your birthday is before the star…

That would make sense if the author specified a specific year's "year group" - e.g. if they had said "I spoke to the 6th year group". But they said they spoke to "THE year group" - which is very confusing to me, even more so after your explanation.

Re: Factories are just rooms

#130

Post by jimnotgym »

JacobAsmuth wrote: post #129
jimnotgym wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The group of children who are the same age. How that is organised into classes depends on how many kids there are. There may be several classes in each year, or like my little rural village school where each class had 2 year groups in it. In the UK state system you normally enter primary school at year 1, go to secondary school for year 7, leave secondary in year 11 (aged 16, or 15 if your birthday is before the star…

That would make sense if the author specified a specific year's "year group" - e.g. if they had said "I spoke to the 6th year group". But they said they spoke to "THE year group" - which is very confusing to me, even more so after your explanation.

I think he is just trying to say he spoke to 'a' year group. If he said he spoke to a class, would that help? You are right that it is not that specific, a year group maybe one class, multiple classes or part of a class.
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