gregpilling

This family is at the top of the opiate pyramid.

Which was my experience. Apparently I have an extra wide head, so even the widest frames didn't fit right. Since I only need the glasses for seeing details, it is not that big of a problem, but I spent a lot of time measuring my head and eyes to get a bad result.

Maybe Apple will build a 3D head modeling software into the IphoneX and revolutionize glasses! a new app idea!

In the meantime, I just increased font size on my monitor!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rjJQUnq5Js

I was on track with the first version at Westwood, in BC when it was ridden by Gary Goodfellow and Steve Crevier. 88-90 era.

Children are 14,10,7 and 4 years old. I am waiting for the day the kids learn to hack the router, but so far they are too well behaved.

So if you have kids, try it!

American Beauty How to Quit a Job With Kevin Spacey

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psNuJuaYqVU

But it is my own fault for not noticing that the drainage lot would be eventually filled in. Oh well, was a nice house to live in and I enjoyed living there. Sold in 1996.

Or is there a good argument that something else will be dominant in the long term >10 years?

I may be clueless, but at least I have tried many things. Some even worked!

The heart of YC’s philosophy is that world has too few people solving fixable problems, a “bottleneck in society,” says Garg. “If you fundamentally believe that, then [Startup School] is exactly the right thing to do. You are empowering a bunch of people to just try and it’ll turn out it’s going to be way easier than they thought it was going to be. And there’ll be more progress.”

Programming welding robots, laser cutters , CNC milling machines and making whatever you can dream up is pretty fun. I was in Las Vegas last week walking through the fancy hotels and casinos admiring all the laser cut steel they use in architecture now. It was fun to tell my wife that I could make the giant metal cards at the ARIA poker room, exactly the same on the new machines I just got. She was quite impressed. We are planning our backyard remodel using all the machines at work. Should be quite spectacular when complete.

A friend gave me a fake Rolex once. He said it was exceptionally good; he had the exact same model that was real and the only difference he could see was that there was an o-ring on the winder of the real Rolex, and none on the fake.

I wore it to a trade show one time, and I was honestly shocked by the positive reception I got as a human -- from every other guy who was wearing a watch!. Usually these were the guys of more importance; buyers and sellers at the executive level, or the CEOs themselves. I hadn't worn a watch since the day my phone could tell time (am old, phones in the 90s did not tell time), so I also hadn't thought about watches in years as a consequence.

I can tell you that the cost of a Rolex is well worth it, from the particular point of view of 'access' to the guys with watches and hey let's talk about them . The watch club. The $40 fake I had was good enough, because who is going to unwind someone else's winder at a social gathering? Similarly other Veblen goods like a Lamborghini (rent one!) that a guy talked about as a conversation piece on a Reddit AMA a day or two ago. Whatever someone is deeply interested in, they will glom onto you if you show anything like authentic interest. If you want my attention, wear a MotoGP shirt or something from VR46.

The fate of the watch? the strap broke and the watch sat in a drawer for a while. My friend offered to fix it, so I gave it back to him about 5 years ago and haven't seen it since! LOL . I haven't needed it either, so I don't care. My phone tells time :) He has promised to return it, but I think he uses it as a spare. His real one stays in the safe, 100% of the time.

You are exactly correct on the tooling costs, except there is no limit to the high end. Ford might spend many millions on tooling for a new car at the extreme end of the scale, for example. I think all tool and die makers are way to used to saying "$10,000 and up" anytime you ask them about die costs.

We often employ ghetto-tools when doing small runs. This means a tool carved out of cheap A36 steel that will only last a few hundred uses, or layers cut out on the laser and stacked up to make functional-but-ugly tool. Tools like this can be made from scrap laying around and some machine time - essentialy free since the costs were already sunk. Its a great way to see if an idea will work, or to make something in small runs of 10 or 50. A $10,000 tooling cost is non-starting if the total sales expected is measured in a few thousand dollars.

This is why flexible tools like laser cutters are so popular. No special tooling to buy, the laser does it all. The high price of tool and die making has put most of those shops out of business or moved it offshore to Asia. What little we do for my company we do inhouse now. The problem with a laser is that everything starts to look too much 2D and too boring. "When everything is a hammer ..."

Flair.co looks like neat stuff. I should count how many I need for my old house that is always the wrong temperature somewhere, with two heat/ac systems and Arizona weather :)

This idea is only useful if it could deliver traffic volumes at meaninful percentage of the current 405 throughput.

wikipedia says "The freeway's annual average daily traffic between exits 21 and 22 in Seal Beach reached 374,000 in 2008" .

So how many car elevators to do 10% of that? How many car elevators to move 37,000 vehicles per day? Assuming a 1 minute cycle time, that would be 25 elevators running 24/7 evenly, with no rush hour (obvious unrealistic).

I think it is a scale problem, much like 3D printers won't upset the economics of high speed injection molding anytime soon.

Just a thought to throw out there.

we make lift kits for pickup trucks, as well as LED lightbar brackets and air horn brackets, but it is really just making hundreds/thousands of parts to bolt into existing holes and make the truck do something a little different. We are in the SEMA Tech Transfer program, so we can get OEM CAD files, and we make everything in our robotically powered, vertically integrated operation in Tucson :)

Robots are for the little people too - not just MegaCorp.

I just purchased my second welding robot. It is a Miller/Panasonic PA-750S with a 92" welding turntable. We make truck accessories with it. I bought a made in Boston laser cutter at the same time, a 4000w IPG LaserCube.

All this new machinery lets us build in one (168 hour) week what we could build in 2015. And it took only one lease payment down to finance - about $8000.00, with another 59 payments of $8000ish to go - so I don't buy the "only the super wealthy can buy robots" idea. Some people on HN have paid that much for an office desk! These machines can make product to completely pay for themselves in one month, if you can get the work for them.

By purchasing these machines, I was able to get some deals that would have gone to China. Then I had to hire 4 new people to run them, and we had to go to working 24/7 from only 40 hours a week before. All of this to make a product that would not sell as well if it had to be priced at human weld costs. The robots are at least 3x more productive than the human doing the same part - if you have enough units to do. 30 minutes of change over time between programs can waste any times savings.

So in my anecdotal experience, everytime I add another automated machine, costs go down, prices go down, sales go way up, payroll goes up a little. I have to keep hiring humans. and I pay them bonuses that they seem pretty happy with. This doesn't count the machine manufacturers, their traveling support staff, the leasing companies who lent the money, etc. etc.

I have friends with manufacturing companies in completely different industries that have the same experience.

If anyone is in Tucson Arizona, you are welcome to come by. I will show you how easy it is to program the robot. It will take me 20 minutes to teach you how to make a basic weld.