91–100 of 111 posts
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What drives me up a wall is when people find a non-working marker... and then put it back! No! Throw it away! It is better to have no markers than have non-working ones. That is an easy and clear signal that it is time to find / buy more markers.
can't you just drip alcohol into the dry ones to get them back to working condition?
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Sometimes you're required by law to go with the lowest valid bid (presumably to discourage kickbacks and self dealing)
Not really. It's to prevent silly mistakes.
Many (most? all?) state and local governments have laws that generally require you to go with the lowest valid bid to an RFP.
I read the whole letter and loved the tone of it! It jumps at you right away that: (1) Here's a guy who really cares about his business, its future, his employees. (2) He talks candidly about the reasons for closing up: his declining health, sales volumes, even including awkward sentences like " So chalk is more environmentally friendly, I think. " I am now a fan of Hagoromo. It was rather refreshing at a time when I…
Not awkward, the sentence you call out. Beautiful, rather, and whether it is an artifact of translation or not, no matter. You didn't mean awkward in a pejorative sense; this is just an affirmation.
The main reason, apparently: "These days, local governments focus on bid prices rather than quality." High quality commodities are considered nowadays luxury and not bare minimum. Quite sad, really.
I think the statement following this is much more important and interesting to HN: > The tendency has become more and more prevalent under electronic auction systems. While incidents like this are often used as examples of the failures of technocracy, I think the problem is elsewhere. A decision process has been out-sourced to a machine that is not smart enough yet to make a good decision. The decision might be good…
Your observations are poignant. There is strong incentive to treat everything as a commodity these days. Part of our business is in helping buyers structure their RFQ documents so that the product or service can be competitively sourced. In the government sector, however, we rarely participate in this process.
Governments must purchase based on their state and local laws, which often ties their hands. A local school system may want to purchase better quality chalk for a reasonable premium, but the laws pertaining to procurement frequently prevent them. It's a really bizarre circumstance where public perception of government waste has resulted in laws that eliminate buyers' ability to cut deals that are better for everyone. I'm not saying it's impossible; it's just much easier for a procurement officer at a local government to follow the standard process (which prioritizes price) than it is to fight for quality.
There are pockets of innovation, however. Our eRA platform stands out because we offer the ability to incorporate non-price factors in to our ranking algorithm. This gives a buyer the ability to "weight" one bidder over the others. We developed some of our most advanced features jointly with local governments in Arizona. I'm not sure I should name names, but there are people doing really great work out in Arizona.
We have even considered founding a separate not-for-profit organization whose entire purpose would be to assist local governments in improving their procurement laws so that there would be a better balance of good sourcing practices and the ability to incentivize quality over price where appropriate. That's a huge challenge though. You frequently end up directly opposed to special interests with very deep pockets and a financial incentive to keep procurement laws just as they are.
1: If you're wondering: http://www.eauctionservices.com
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One of the interesting notes in the article is that they apparently use a lot of oyster shells. I would assume the shells are typically a waste product in other (likely food) industry processes. That's pretty darn green. Besides, we have a lot of limestone, veritable rock-oceans of it. That's part of why it's incredibly difficult to talk about waste on industrial scales. One plant's garbage is frequently another's in…
>Besides, we have a lot of limestone, veritable rock-oceans of it. Sure but the amount of carbon you burn to get to that rock, excavate it, process it, move it, etc, etc is non-trivial. A computer and projector on 8 hours of day is a drop in a bucket to that.
In fact the cost things like PECVD or dry etching is so disproportionate compared to drilling a hole in the ground, that I'm willing to bet a computer is the equivalent of hundreds of years worth of a blackboard with chalk.
The main reason, apparently: "These days, local governments focus on bid prices rather than quality." High quality commodities are considered nowadays luxury and not bare minimum. Quite sad, really.
This whole saga pretty much has to inspire someone to build and reverse engineer the machine/recipe. The overlap of people who like to tinker with this stuff and people who love the chalk seems big enough. It's also interesting that they seem to be somewhat oblivious of the US demand. At least it seemed like that. My guess is that they could have sold one of the machines to a US based entrepreneur. I can pretty much…
I hope this entrepreneur have a handy geiger counter next him/her when buying those machines. Just in case... better safe than sorry
This whole saga pretty much has to inspire someone to build and reverse engineer the machine/recipe. The overlap of people who like to tinker with this stuff and people who love the chalk seems big enough. It's also interesting that they seem to be somewhat oblivious of the US demand. At least it seemed like that. My guess is that they could have sold one of the machines to a US based entrepreneur. I can pretty much…
> It's also interesting that they seem to be somewhat oblivious of the US demand. I have no idea why, but with Japanese companies it's a common theme. Most don't even care about overseas expansion, and if they do, it's poorly executed (say, Daihatsu, who dicked around on the European market for decades without ever listening to even trivial customer wishes, and then wrote the whole business off because it "obviously…
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> Chalk is on it's way out. It's a rapidly shrinking market. I am a math professor. Most of us prefer chalk, and have no desire to go to whiteboards, smart boards, Powerpoints, what have you. I think that there is a fairly durable market for chalk. Moreover, over the last five years I think that awareness of Hagoromo (and more generally, of high-end chalk) has been growing. You see it for the first time when visiting…
As a student, I preferred chalkboards to whiteboards because they were easier to read. It seems that most of the time, unless the professor had an exceptionally well working dry-erase marker, the lines were too thin and light for me to read them, no matter the color. I remember thinking that the whiteboards were an improvement at first, but that quickly changed when I realized I couldn't read what was written on them…