quartesixte

That army of “low-skilled” workers are highly skilled machine operators.

CNC programming isn’t generally performed by engineers—it is currently mostly performed by veteran machine operators.

To get enough veteran machine operators who have the skill and talent to program at the level necessary for high-precision consumer goods, you need quite the workforce pool.

And then add in all the other CNC machinists and manufacturing engineers you need for the auxiliary industries (tooling, molding, the machines themselves) and it starts to add up.

Don’t forget every other industry that is competing for this labor pool.

That aluminum milling scaling problem itself is like, an entire category of hard.

CNC machines are hard to scale anything more than linearly. We need to train up hundreds of thousands to become CNC machinists. An entire support industry for machine maintenance, tooling manufacturing (an even harder problem), consumable commodities needs to be similarly scaled in parallel.

True but certain traditional cultural events and norms seem to point to lifespans being much shorter than we generally experience them now to be.

60 - 70 seemed to be the upper ceiling for a very long time.

Is there anywhere new for us to go? Or must we wait for some new leap forward still?

AFAICT/R, JP Post banking used to be really barebones, even for late 2010s Japan. No credit cards/debit cards, not a lot of financial products, etc. In recent years it seems like they have added a credit card and a debit card and online banking as well.

On the flipside, they are one of the most ubiquitous ATMs in Japan and your local post office will double as a branch for JP Post Bank (which are everywhere).

Oh and it's nation wide too! Which is kind of important for a country where some banks restrict activities and branches to their direct locality.

Man. I wish patio11 would talk about Japanese banking more because to most American audiences that system is also just, completely something else.

Not making payroll because you go cashflow negative makes Boards and C-suites tremble in fear because of the whole “piercing the corporate veil” concept that makes them personally liable for not making payroll.

So you layoff 10% to save the other 90%.

Because otherwise you’d have put 100% of your company out of a job + knock on effects to local economy, being sued, prosecuted for all sorts of things etc etc

The USA, like all of us, lives in an industrial world and have maintained their supremacy in that world by being the pre-eminent industrial military power.

The loss of American manufacturing directly threatens this pre-eminence, which in turn threatens a lot of what made this world the way it is.

I guess a good way to extend the sports betting model analogy is that Buffett’s moves are so large + controlling seats on boards is equivalent to sports players fixing games in response to bets made on them? Buffett wants stock to go up, he can tell the company to take actions to do so. Something individual retail traders (or most funds for that matter) cannot do.

As a layperson, I always wonder: is there some equivalent of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle at play in the market? There is no way to make an observation (in this case, a trade) without altering the very thing your are observing (the market).

Well, I grossly oversimplified what Berkshire Hathaway does but yes he had money and kept making really good informed gambling decisions.

I've probably said this before on HN, but something that tickles me about this entire story is that Buffett himself did not get to where he is by just holding the SP500. But yet this story gets trotted out at the water cooler every once in a while as if this is the source of his wealth, and that it'd behoove us to do the same.

Except Buffett and Munger made their money on picking individual stocks and making WSB-style-yolo-bets on them. Or doing classic acquisition/PE stuff (Geico, See's, etc).

The other thing that always catches me off guard about this story (as a late millennial) is how Index/ETF investing was not a common thing when this bet was made! Which is crazy to me but all this advice that media (traditional and social alike) that is made to seem timeless was not a clear-cut obvious answer in the early 2000s.

Which makes sense when you consider the fact that these ETFs are actually fairly recent phenomenons.

Risk appetite and tolerance changes dramatically once you hit many commas and zeros in your net liquid assets. Hedge funds offer to "hedge" enough risk to make rich people feel more comfortable about their money (making rich people feel comfy about their money is a huge business in of itself).

Chasing an extra 2-3% in gains in return for exposing yourself to more draw down risk starts feeling very different when you have $200mm in liquid cash and even a modest +5% a year is $10mm.

On the other hand, sometimes you want above-average returns and are willing to pay the fee to potentially nab it.

IIRC this was a key part. Anything that “moves” and alters the state of a Rocket in flight could be considered key.

And this story, as far as I remember from the book, was from the Falcon 1 days, where reusability was not on the table. Early days type stuff where cash reserve preservation was tantamount.

The guy “had never built anything like the actuator” but he was an engineer who (hopefully by virtue of being an engineer) understood the first principles behind designs.

To put into context, a large part of SpaceX’s unique competitive advantage comes actions like this. The Aerospace industry up until SpaceX mostly operated in the manner you suggest: buy the outsourced parts, design only what is “truly key”, and then cobble it all together.

Except that exposes yourself to large amounts of supply chain risk, design constraints, and price gouging like no other. The actuator costed $120k because there were no competitors and they knew the old primes would buy it anyways.

Elon definitely went against the grain of established thinking at the time and it’s clearly paid off. Maybe not “business genius” but it’s not a small undertaking and went against decades of ingrained engineering culture and business practice.

On top of everyone else’s comments on how this is actually a good business decision, it also could be a very good engineering decision.

An off the shelf actuator could mean they would have to adapt other hardware to the actuator. By in-housing their own, they can make the actuator specific to their needs.

Rockets are tricky because of how very specific everything can be to the specific rocket and system that you built.

It probably was about 2 months of initial CAD and drawings, another 2ish months of manufacturing, a month of testing, a month of iteration, another month of manufacturing, more testing, reviews, qualifications. Add in some time for Davis working on other things + the part waiting for other projects to finish manufacturing or testing, and you get nine months.

For a cleansheet part from a engineer who never built one in his life during the early days of this approach to aerospace, 9 months seem reasonable to me.

Yeah I briefly got really fancy with InDesign at work when I was much younger and arrogant. And then I had to hand off the project.

Instantly broke. Spent a good 3 hours that day porting to PowerPoint.

That’s also entirely USA centric and a byproduct of everyone sticking to SMS-phone number systems to chat. It drives me nuts.

WhatsApp. WeChat. Line. Kakao. Facebook Messenger. Most of the world has switched to these dedicated apps.

Only glimmer of hope is that gen-z/gen-alpha is really into Discord (at least all the ones I know). Might finally bring down the iMessage group chats.

>namely perceived ”poor”

This is particularly bonkers to me given how expensive Samsung flagships are, but I guess Android occupying the sub-$600 range really enforces in children (physical or mental) that Android = Poor

I like to also imagine that since telegrams were supposed to be short and direct, it was the written equivalent of yelling over a bullhorn. Anything more eloquent would be written by hand in proper casing (and cursive)

It’s been a while since I read it but as far as I remember, dart guns were mentioned in the book as part of a pistol + knife strategy, where you’d fire a stun round at the opponent and then close the gap with your knife. The shields are velocity dependent so slower moving dart/pellet guns were also common weapons.

>So, shouldn't something like cars get this level of diligence then?

They do. At least the, "engineering of the vehicle itself and then manufacturing it" part.

A lot of Aerospace designing, testing, and manufacturing is built off the foundation the automotive world laid down. Heck, one of the key standards, the SAE standard, is called such because it literally stands for Society of Automotive Engineers.

Cars may be involved in a lot of deaths every year. But rarely do people die because their car spontaneously combusted/fell apart while someone drove it.

This is the euphemistic way of saying “Parents need to be able to call their kids in the event of a school shooting”.

Unless Tax Forfeiture was happening because the counties could get excess profit off the forfeiture.

If it costs more money to sell the house at face value of taxes owed then the state may be deterred.

Unless, corruption occurs where a tax hike is implemented one year causing undue hardship, forfeiture happens, houses are seized, sold at the value of tax shortfall to a “unrelated private citizen” and then sold off for profit, profit then being somehow funneled into the local politician who made that unreasonable tax hike?

Prop 13 in California doesn’t exist for just any old reason…

And then you get a doctor from Japan!

Add a small haptic/vibe motor to give me notification buzzes (perhaps a pseudo-morse code to indicate type of notification) and I’d be immediately sold.

Perhaps a way to DIY this? I wonder how to get motors that small…

And as a postal service, writing off 4.2mil letters is absolutely unacceptable so thus we must dedicate the resources to mitigate this tail risk.

This is a common pattern, and why I think AI risk is overstated…unless we suddenly decide to start wholesale writing off the consequences of tail risk.

It helps that rocketry is 1) kind of a solved problem 2) a lot of unsolved problems get solved by NASA scientists so is open sourced 3) the laws of physics demand that certain outcomes.

Money, gatekeeping, harsh moderation rules. Extremely niche topics that ChatGPT probably lacks enough modeled data for.

In essence, what forums of yore used to be like anyways.

I think we vastly underestimate how much bespoke, physical labor and bespoke, tedious engineering goes into the high tech equipment that drives forward innovation.

What I am trying to say is, work for a defense contractor.

To support this anecdatally, I had severe pneumonia Senior Year in High School. Absolutely wrecked my health and athletic ability for years — and I was an active runner and participant in various combat sports.

Severe infections and diseases wreck your body in the same way a car crash or a serious athletic injury does. It leaves a mark on the body.

Long Covid seems real enough and we should do more to find ways to combat it from onset — I am afraid the current sufferers might only find mitigations and not total solutions.

Some mixture of hubris, willful blindness, and ignorance.