One year ago today: August 1, 2016, Trumpian philosophy.
Five years ago today: August 1, 2012, 89,076 times.
Nine years ago today: August 1, 2008, a thousand a day.
Random years ago today: August 1, 2003, a million toothpicks.
Be sure to look at today’s last laugh, from JimmyR’s site. Brought to you by the same generation who know all about World War Eleven. Yes folks, this is the crowd being heralded as America’s leaders of the future. Let’s see, it takes twenty years for a generation to have its impact, so that’s 18 years left for the smart people to head for either New Zealand or Mars. Because this country is already taking one massive dump and these uneducated left-wing fanatics have not even reached voting age. They can’t read, they can’t write, and they’ve been indoctrinated worse than any group in world history. Here’s their leader. Ha, I knew that would catch your eye.
Not feeling up to par, I took a half-day to look at the software that is available for 3D design. The version I read most on was called Tinkercad, which I did not like immediately due to the lack of anonymity. You have to set up an account, it is not software you can download and install at your leisure. In my opinion, all such sites comb the user input for any idea they can possibly steal. If I’m wrong, prove it.
None of the software is user-friendly. Most require the user to imagine an object as the assemblage of dozens of standard shapes. That explains the chunky look of the output. But this requires imagination on a scale that is not out there. Drawing anything with this tedious arrangement is not for your average camper. I read an entire chapter on how to design a chess piece. I looked at the beginning chapters of autoCad and 123CAD, and was just as dismayed. I never bothered to learn to draw and don’t want to now. Give me software that can work with my freehand sketches.
Some of the software said they could render something from a draft and the results were iffy. Anything drawn with precision had a massive learning curve. Tinkercad showed a method to make the fin of a rocket by, are you ready for this:
A) Draw concentric circles and stretch into an ellipse.
B) Give the ellipse a thickness and “slice” this dimension into four equal pieces in a stack.
C) Cut the stacks into four along the major and minor axes.
D) Unstack the quarters and rotate or flip them into the desired configuration.
Now I ask you if you would go through that to draw a rocket fin? Maybe, if you were a design engineer getting handsomely paid for it. The vendor said this sped up time to production by a factor of ten. Yeah, I’ll race you cutting the fin with scissors out of a handy piece of cardboard. The advertising for all 3D printers emphasized speed, that they now work much faster than the early models. They don’t look any faster. And I cannot recommend these printers as a household product until something comes along that allows an ordinary stiff like me to produce gears and mechanisms and all the parts by just describing what I want.
There is a gadget that will scan the dimensions of an object and create the print file for you. That involves having a model of the object to scan. I never became a sculptor, either.
Amish wedding menu.
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Hankering for French toast mañana, (the thrift has bread and muffins) I hit the thrift just before closing and found a bag that had one of those pumps for inflating air mattresses. For $2.50, I need the motor. When I got home, the bag contained two motors, one was a battery powered pump and very well designed. It there is one incentive that will get me to finish that floor up front it will be to get my nice work desk back in operation. Where I can design and solder in comfort, but the space must be almost a clean room. Can’t do that with sawdust and drywall dust all over the place.
What the heck, I’ll tell you now. The printer deposits metal alloy similar to how 3D plastic printing works. But the metal has binding elements to hold it in shape until they put in a ferocious microwave blast furnace. The heat melds the metal. When it cools, you break away the mold or support pieces, and viola (not voila). Congratulations to Desktop Metals for being up front about their pricing. The machine, available in 2018, is $120,000. The full production system, which needs four furnaces to keep up with the printer, will cost you $360,000. That’s around a third of the price of the competition, which are printers that need expensive lasers and even more expense raw materials.
These machines target the traditional tooling and lathing operations. It uses metals that are already commonly available. The price of prototyping and construction is about comparable to a machine shop, but #D is an emerging technology, the other methods are already about as cheap as they are ever going to get. What to invest in? The company that builds the machines or the company that uses the machines in a profitable operation. Good question, because my interest lies mainly with the technology. At least should something happen along my way, I’ll know what to look for.
“If the baby is happy,
don’t try to make it happier.”
~ Keeton.
This is the new Kalashnikov killing machine, the little guy at center. You may know of this company from its famous AK-47, the gun that that is so common that, as P.J. O’Rouke says, it makes every two-bit hoodlum with a cause a life member of the NRA. The novelty of this system is AI, or artificial intelligence. That weapon makes its own kill decisions. There is no human operator in the loop. I don’t know the details but the system is apparently autonomous. This probably means if there are inadvertent casualties, that’s just too bad compared to the overall savings.
Leaving only to do a grocery shop, I took the side roads to tour past four places in the neighborhood that are building garages or adding rooms to the house. Although they are built on solid poured foundations, there is no way these places had expensive blueprints drawn up. I’m tempted to wait until I see the owner working on his own and just ask him how he went about getting a permit, if any. These are new structures with new designs going up in a nearly historical area of town. I’m most curious how all this fits into the system. I got nothing but the runaround when I tried to get information down at City Hall.
All my questions accomplished was to let them know my intentions. That’s something that has never worked for me or anybody I know. Although I did not show anybody ID or give out any personally identifying information when I was shopping and buying, I noticed at every turn there was tremendous pressure to get everything on file. I had to attend a meeting with the title transfer lawyers, who refused to do the transaction by mail. One of them said they “liked” to make sure they were “dealing with a real person”. I did not ask who appointed him public watchdog.
I only went along with it because I felt I had no choice and man, they tried for an hour to pry information out of me. I say tried, because they got answers, but not information. You would have been proud of my performance. What irked me most was the number of times (6) they tried to get a phone number out of me and the number of times (7) they asked if I had a valid driver’s license. No dice with that.
ADDENDUM
Here’s an interesting theory. Remember the Tylenol scare, with the poison in the capsules? It was an example we studied in the 80s in accounting class because of the measures that the manufacturer took. This was the start of the sheets of individually wrapped pills and capsules. These were handed off to the public as a security measure and the public bought it. At a much higher price. That’s the topic of the study. Accounting was changing from a focus on accuracy to methods of getting people to pay higher prices for the same product. We did calculations on perceived value.
If the product was simply put in a bottle with a sealed plastic shroud that had to be removed to open the cap, people balked at paying a higher price. But the same medicine on a perforated sheet with each dose in a little plastic bubble was perceived as having more value. Up went the price and it has stayed high to this day. Using this method, ordinary cold medicine could be sold for a dollar per capsule. Safety measure, my eye. Cold medicine is another of those products that, if competition worked, would have dropped in price.
Maybe I still have a touch of the flu. At my age? I’m still staying put with my chicken soup and rest. I want to make a trip to buy a laptop in Port Richie soon. Driving a motorcycle down the freeway is not that great a plan if you feel woozy. The DVD movie for this evening is “Snitch”, which portrays the plea bargaining system for what it is. Legalized blackmail. Again, this will continue until some fat cat’s son is set up, then they’ll have some big investigation clearing everybody of blame, and the next round will start. The movie is worth watching just for the message sent about this totally disgusting practice.
What I did not know is that the drug cartels have to now physically ship their bales of money back into Mexico. They can’t wire it from the local Wells Fargo any more. I never thought about that because I was caught up in how the government, who knows darn well who the king pins are, used the excuse of wire transfers to get every American citizen under surveillance. The cartels moved on to other methods, but the surveillance remains in place, just another lost piece of privacy to the common man.
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