It’s a standing joke how most people in North America today could not go back and pass their own high school exams. Myself, I get lost on some of the more advanced accounting techniques. But I remember their fashion. One was the calculation of the point where it was better to let stock run out than overstock and have unsold inventory on the shelf at closing time. This formula has been applied to newspapers in Florida. You cannot usually find a newspaper for sale after 5:30 PM in this town. It also works for store hours, so I wonder when that will take effect? (You’ll be able to tell when the shops start closing at weird times like 8:47:16 precisely.)
I should have continued to the lake. I’d just found out my prescription co-pay has dropped by $200 so it is like getting some free cash right when I could use it.
Instead, I went over to Barnes to read for free in the AC. Well, not that free. A coffee and scone costs $5.00 these days. Hang on for a second, let me total up what I spent today. Yep, including $15 for gasoline, I shelled out $42.00 for basically a nothing day. It is scary how few people can afford that little unless they are working. Careful what I just said there.
Trivia. I examined a sketch of a monorail crossing a canyon on a single piece of wire. Balanced on the wire like a tightrope walker. The cabin was held steady by a set of generators. The idea was to save on building expensive bridges. The date on the illustration was 1907. Other ideas that didn’t pan out are the traffic light built into the dash of your car (1932) and that the majority of people in the US would be living in mobile homes, constantly moving around (1935).
What I was after was the latest on 3D printing. As JZ would say, it is out of control. Some sources refer to it as “additive manufacturing” but I find that hard to spell out and not any more descriptive. I’ve lost track in the sense I can no longer monitor the developments. For example, there is a company that will print your design and market it for you on their site. You need only supply something that sells and they’ll print it anywhere in the world for you, zero inventory, zero anything but your cost.
This sounds innocuous, but it is ground-breaking. If you sold 20,000 objects in this manner, you would experience what the market calls a “passive income structure”. This is so disruptive to the existing manufacturing and supply chain models that I have no doubt there has to be an enormous backlash both soon and nearby. It propels the consumer into the front line and it guts the entire infrastructure. And the rich are not going to take that lying down.
Here’s a bit of technical material on 3D printers, remembering that one premise of this blog is to present things in a user-friendly format. First, the printers get hot. They have to extrude the plastic, which means heat it up, squeeze it through an opening, and let it cool. That temperature is 425 degrees Fahrenheit, so leave it alone. I’ve heard bad reports of printers that are not enclosed in a case having cooling problems from ordinary air movement in the room. Also, the aroma of melted plastic really bothers some people, like me.
Your next consideration is resolution. Smaller is better. The smaller the melted plastic nozzle, the finer the detail in your print. In some printers, the nozzle moves, in others the base plate shifts around. It is too early to know which is better. Consumer 3D printers use only plastic so far. The ABS plastic we talked about comes out like Lego, hard and brittle. The other plastic, I don’t know, I think they call it PLA, but it is modified corn starch. I have no doubt the factories which make both brands will follow Hewlett-Packard’s printer ink rip-off for chiseling the public.
One item already being printed is replacement reef parts. The Australian government has mapped out the dead swaths of the Great Barrier Reef and they are 3D printing concrete scaffolding to replicate the coral growth that normally takes ten centuries. A surprise to beginners is the slicing software--it is not included, it must be mastered, and it takes its sweet time. Once you have a 3D design on your computer, this software “slices” the object into virtual layers which are the instructions the 3D printer can digest.
The biggest disappointment for me was calculating how long it would take to print the 10,000 toothpick holders. Not counting the slicing, the cleaning, turnaround and who knows what other processes that take time, I would need the printer occupied full time for three and a half years. That’s a long time to be breathing melted plastic fumes. If I farm out the design, I’m still at the mercy of the system that kept me in poverty for the years of my life that mattered.
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