The Soul of Maintaining a New Machine

Instructions and hertz have not been equivalent for almost a quarter of a century now, though.

For a long while, I've been helping people diagnose problems with 3D printers and one of the things that stands out to me is how often people throw away bad prints while they're troubleshooting.

One of the first things I ask someone now is to give me their test prints for the last few changes they've made and what they changed, if they remember. Nine times out of ten, just looking at other factors, I've been able to pinpoint what's wrong.

Interestingly, this has also led me to a few "is it turned on" questions, the first of which is "when is the last time you tightened all the bolts that should be tight and loosened the bolts that should be loose?" The simple act of making sure tight things are square and tight has resolved many an unrelated problem because it makes you check so many different parts of the machine.

This also correlates with one of the takeaways from the old Computerworld column called Shark Tank. The most common aspect of the solution was to simply go and observe the failure, because so often it was an unaccounted for externality -- such as a cleaning crew unplugging something at 2AM when a system would "mysteriously" go down.

that seems like the right kind of comparison, yeah, although it's surprising the world's stock exchanges aren't worth more.† the infographic article is excellent, though i guess now cryptocurrencies would be more like 15 squares instead of three

2% is far from insignificant! argentina's gdp is less than 1% of the world's—as are each of switzerland, taiwan, belgium, israel, south africa, pakistan, new zealand, nigeria, greece, and hungary. if the advent of cryptocurrencies has added a new power to the world stage of the same order of magnitude as taiwan, pakistan, or nigeria, that's a momentous event—particularly since it's doing it by giving tens of millions of the world's poorest people relief from terrible governance

(funding universal public access to history's biggest library despite prohibitions from the world's greatest powers seems significant, too. you've been in india, you know what library access is like outside the rich world, and you're surely aware that sci-hub and libgen have had a huge positive impact even inside the rich world)

in the infographic, the m1 money supply is about four months of world gdp, 35 trillion dollars, and that seems like the most nearly equivalent thing in the list to compare bitcoin to. it's about 3%. if we assume that countries' money supply is close to proportional to their gdp, that would make bitcoin the 8th largest world currency, following the euro, the us dollar, the yuan, the yen, the indian rupee, the pound, and the brazilian real. it would beat the canadian dollar, the russian ruble, and the other 150 or so national currencies, going by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...

if we use the m2 money supply instead, bitcoin is about 1% of it and drops to about 15th

on the opposite end of the scale, supposedly there are two or three thousand billionaires in the world; bitcoin distribution is widely considered to be highly inequitable, and so it may have added a few dozen or a few hundred to that number. considering the historical impact of certain individual billionaires like andrew carnegie, george soros, john d. rockefeller, and leland stanford, that seems like it might also be important

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† world gdp is 110 trillion dollars per year; if corporate profits are 10% of that, that'd be 11 trillion dollars per year of profits, and you'd expect share prices to average around 20 years of profits, which would be 220 trillion dollars, much higher than the 89.5 trillion dollars in the infographic. perhaps outside the usa corporate profits are much lower, or investing in the stock market is much riskier? it's certainly riskier here

Back in 1986 I worked for $BIG_BANK where we replaced humans, typewriters and carbon paper forms with Xerox laser printers (conveniently leapfrogging daisy wheel and dot-matrix technology). These beasts were the size of a large microwave oven, or maybe a small dorm fridge turned on its side, and I seem to remember them costing $6,000 but my memory is fuzzy and it may have been as much as $15,000.

Anyway, these printers were finicky, and I remember we were visited by the same two Xerox service techs on a regular basis. In addition to repairs, they were faced with the near impossible task of keeping the toner (which was dispensed by hand from a plastic container, similar to powdered clothing detergent) off their white shirts and ties. We saw those guys so often that even now, 38 years later, I still remember that one of them was named Randy.

For what it's worth, there are two other chapters up. One is about round the world sailing. It is also worth a read.

I've not been able to get into the third chapter, but it looks equally interesting.