Slashdot Mirror
3D Printing and the Replicator Economy
An anonymous reader writes "'Tea. Earl Grey. Hot,' is a command familiar to every Trek fan as representing everyday use of replicator technology. While its use on the show is simply sci-fi wizardry, the beginnings of that technology is now making it into homes, and could spark an industrial revolution. 'New 3D printing and other so-called additive manufacturing technologies are based on methods that industries developed over the past quarter century to rapidly create prototypes of mechanical parts for testing. But as these methods become increasingly sophisticated, demand is rising to use them to manufacture finished products, not only in factories but also at a boutique, one-off level for individuals. ... Already, 3D printing has been used to make tools and artworks, custom-fitted prosthetics for amputees, components for aviation and medical instruments, solid medical models of bones and organs based on MRI scans, paper-based photovoltaic cells, and the body panels for a lightweight hybrid automobile.'"
stock up on bullets EMP's and lasers don't work on them
Boobs are a myth!
. . . the post-scarcity economy will be in full swing just as unemployment hits 100%. We'll be able to print out cars instead of just living in them!
3D printers have a way to go, but there already have been modeled objects that have received infringement claims. It will only get worse.
On the one hand you have the possible utopia of unlimited "free" stuff.
And on the other, the distopia of companies locking this technology up, and firing (almost all) the workers.
It would be great to believe the former. But a whole lot of people seem to be afraid of the latter.
Is there any unwavering indicator one way or the other?
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
So, when can I download my free car from TPB?
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
And the 3D printer would spit out a liquid almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.
From what I remember replicators converted energy into matter. 3D printing converts matter in one form like powder to a more solid form another albeit it is very customizable in the shape of the objects. To me it's more like assembly than replication.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Can you imagine the kind of virus attacks you will have to protect yourself from?
Beyond a pile of dildos falling out of your inbox every day, you may have to deal with theif-bots, explosives, smelly messes, noise makers, and herbal viagra advertisements. Then, there will also be the polotical campaigns.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
3D printing addresses one component of "stuff". Electronics, servomotors, glass, ceramics, metals, all those are components that may need to play a functional part in anything much more complicated than a Lego brick.
Don't get me wrong: I've been in complete awe of 3D printing since I saw one in 1991 at IMTS in Chicago. They used lasers to spot-harden UV-curable resin, then lowered the support table by 0.1 mm and drew in the next layer. After it was complete, they drained the resin and rinsed the part off. It was absolutely amazing, and that was 20 years ago. Modern additive machines are even cooler, with the ability to combine different materials and colors, making a finished part with a much cleaner process.
But they still have to affordably produce a sufficient number of end-user-usable things before we'll see them in the average home. Need a 100 cc measuring cup because all you have are imperial measuring cups? No problem! Need a TV remote control, or a toaster? Sorry.
John
The natural progression of most products is towards disposable goods. The danger of this generation (and likely the next) of replication machines is that the materials will not have the kind of physical properties that make things durable. Luckily we've been weaned off durable, and now we expect to be able to break most items with moderate human force. And these items will fit the bill in that case.
Making components for system critical or life safety functions, except as en emergency "everyone will die if the part isn't here right now" condition, is a bad, bad idea. Of course, there are too many people in the world...maybe this is just another way to thin out the herd?
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Picard's Star Trek post-dated Douglas Adams' take on the replicating tea machine, which was a sadly far more likely outcome than the Star Trek ideal.
A far more interesting exploration of replicating technology within the home was in Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age. Although aspects of the exploration within that book went somewhat esoteric it did at least give a hard sci-fi contemplation of the impact of the technology, instead of using it as the background to space opera.
These guys http:http://www.conformis.com/index.asp/ make knee replacements based off of MRI or CT scans. They exactly match your knee rather than the surgeon choosing from small, medium, or large parts out of a bin.
Amazing stuff.
When was the last time you built your own car? All parts required are readily available.
What percentage of all PC users build their own PC (overall PC users, not /. geeks)??
The thing is, most people don't have patince/skill to build things, and they're better of just buying thigs they need, like TFA says.
3D printing could be the next industrial revolution, but it could also be a niche for hobbists.
A few well timed words from the BBC http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b012r7ty - listen or look. Quite a few ideas and links to follow.
The 3D design can cost a lot in time, software or contracting work. That is typically ignored in news articles.
Models vary in strength and precision depending on the RP process & material. When you need fictional fitting parts, the finishing & fitting time can become the biggest expense.
I don't think RP 3D modeled "printer" parts at home are anything but a development tool at best.
Want SS, titanium or SLS Nylon Parts? Be prepared to spend $0.5 million or so for the machine.
Devil is in the details.
In convenience stores such as Walgreens and CVS, film developing is becoming less common but customers still order large stacks of digital photos. I wonder if it's time for them to replace the film developing machine with a 3D printer. It would be neat to set the machine out where customers could see it, as long as it's not too sensitive to vibration as children would run up to it. The complexity of orders could range from pre-modeled objects to customer-modeled. The store could only finish about one object a day, but that would suit management since production is low-labor and retail staffs are stretched thin nowadays.
Is anybody here currently working in a retail photo shop, or better yet, work in equipment acquisition? How viable is this?
I think people who say 3D printers are "not going anywhere thanks to IP law" are missing the point. 3D printers are for people who want to design and build their own things and less about trying to save money by building your own version of a absurdly cheap Walmart available gizmo. A 3D printer will never compete with Lego as an affordable way to replace Lego's manufacturing capabilities. I have no doubt that these machines will be co-opted for nefarious goals on occasion, but mostly they will be cost additive rather than cost saving or even cost neutral compared to the mark up on a manufactured items.
I have a couple of things I've been wanting to build for quite sometime but I don't have rapid prototyping capabilities at home. Once I get to my local hackerspace and print out a a few prototypes and get the design worked out I'll be having them machined out of aluminum and sell the products. More money will move through the economy and maybe even a few jobs will be created. These may even bring about a renaissance in the small business. Here's to hoping anyway.
Sounds like some of Alvin Toffler's Future Shock ideas are coming into play.
Haas Automation, the largest automated machine tool maker in the US uses automated machine tools to make more automated machine tools. They use several hundred of their own products on their factory floor. This also lets them test out their product in a real working environment.
3D printers have a way to go, but there already have been modeled objects that have received infringement claims. It will only get worse.
You pay the licensing fees just as you would for anything else.
Life goes on.
Ralph Williams' "Business As Usual, During Alterations" First publication, "Astounding," July 1958.
For any non-trivial application of a replicator there will be issues.
You LEGO house needs to be structurally sound.
It needs to be fire resistant. The plastic must not off-gas toxic fumes.
All this and more has to be documented and certified in a way that will be persuasive to your local zoning board, building inspector, real estate agent, your Savings & Loan.
Look, 3D printers are cool. They're awesome for anyone who ever wanted to build something quickly. I use one at work regularity so I fully appreciate the technology..... BUT they are just not cost effective compared to mass manufacturing processes.
There are often many different ways to build something in manufacturing. You can machine something, mold something, 3D print something, etc, and many different flavors of each type of manufacturing. It will be 50 years before 3D printing a lego is anywhere near as cheap as just molding a lego if ever. This is the way of things. 3D printing is awesome for doing small custom things and giving you the ability to do stuff that you either couldn't do before or that would take you a lot of time and skill to develop on your own.
Let me give you a simple example. I use our 3D printer to manufacture small plastic pieces used in semi-conductors assemblies. This is not my primary job, just a skill that allows me to get my real job done faster. The size of the pieces I print out are around 2" x 2" x 0.5" or smaller. If I try to mass manufacturer them then I can *maybe* do them around 1 per hour. (I have to fill the platter with say 20 of them and it'll take me 20 hours to complete). This will get me accuracy that is not quite as good as molding or machining, but it's within an order of magnitude.
So, it's not better, not cheaper, and not faster (on a per piece basis). What it gets me is small-quantity-cheap. Custom stuff, prototypes, one-offs, etc. That's it's advantage. AND it can also do some stuff traditional machining/molding just can't do ever. These are this technology's sweet spots. Even if you give the technology 10 or 20 years, you're not going to compete with molding. It's just not cost effective.
Yes 3D printing is awesome. Yes it gives us the ability to prototype stuff in 6 hours or overnight. Yes it's cheap for stuff like that, but it's just not the be-all and do-all that the "tea, Earl gray" line would have you expect. It will be rare that you will save money by printing out your own stuff even ignoring the cost of the machine itself.
d
all language nazi's will burne in heil!
WhyTF does Picard have to say "Tea. Earl Grey. Hot" every freakin' time?
A computer that is sophisticated enough to fly a warpdrive spaceship and replicate food should be able to understand user preferences, no?
Shouldn't he just say, "cuppa tea" or just, "the usual" and get a nice hot cup of Earl Grey?
Only explanation is it's MS Enterprise 5.7 and user preferences are the great new groundbreaking feature in MS Enterprise 6... expected any decade now.
I agree that there are serious technical hurdles to get over before these could possibly be revolutionary to the average person, and those hurdles might never be overcome.
However, I feel it's worth mentioning that your entire post could have been written about computers at any point from the 1940s until the mid-1980s, and they turned out to be kind of a big deal after all.
ignorant point of view, tech been used by industry for decades. As it becomes within reach of home user many things are possible. I was once manager of a group that made power switching systems for buildings and military installations, and whenever Motorola would go into prototyping mode for new cell phone lines all my projects for transfers switch enclosure would get backed up, all the mom & pop prototyping shops for miles around Chicago would be backed up.
Brings to mind an old novel "A is for Anything". Replicators that could replicate anything, including themselves and people, resulted in a society with a very few, very affluent, and a large slave class.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_for_Anything
While I agree to some extent with the sentiment you're expressing, I think, in general, the progression has been much more toward identifying the purpose of an item and creating that item to exactly fill that purpose, including its purpose-stated lifetime.
That's all separate from certain consumer goods that have been designed to fail for the good of continual demand. What I'm more saying is, the progression of technology has been more towards "Well, we want a solid model of this guy's bones so that we can plan our surgery with precision before-hand, so if it only lasts a week, that's fine", and engineers have responded with "Well, if we only need it to last that long and not be too durable, I bet we can build a machine that produces them on demand".
FanFictionRecs.net
Also note that each time a thing is destroyed, society loses its value. Of course, if you can melt down the broken plastic cup as fresh feed stock, then the cost of remaking it is extremely low... but then we get into soviet methods ....
Support my political activism on Patreon.
They are just about the most boring technology we have today. They will not revolutionize anything..
They already have. Surgery (by modeling from MRI scans to get a better look before surgery), surgical replacement (custom-made joint replacements), product design testing and visualization (i.e. make a shoe or a skateboard; I've considered using one to make the plastic housing for a particular bicycle light), architectural modeling (quick and easy way to go from the CAD design to a model: much less time and labor).
Biotech has focused on using similar techniques to construct organs and such from tissues, with limited success. Forensics has found the use of image analysis software helpful: one can scan a bunch of pieces of a fragmented object and have the computer emit a physical model of the original undamaged object.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
Do you remember the first computers? You could spend 20 minutes loading a simple game from audio tape on a Commadore PET, only to have it fail the checksum. The audio was 'beep'. The displays were black and green, or awful CGA black, magenta, cyan and white, or black, red, green and yellow. The printers used thermal paper and had a tiny resolution. It was grim, but it was fun too for some of us who could see this as the first glimmers of a new universe of possibilities from a machine made not for particular purpose, but to be capable of doing an unknown nearly infinite set of things. Meanwhile the press said 'you can store recipies on these things', and 'they can remind you of diary appointments', and the average user wondered what the fuss was about.
The RepRap is like an X-Y plotter with a glue gun. It will produce arbitrary but rather wonky shapes with glue gun drool. It is pretty limited in materials. If you say "Faberge Egg" and hold out your hands, you will be disappointed. But it is affordable in the way the early computers were if you were a dedicated hobbyist, such as you may find in the the Slashdot target demographic. There are machines that can manage more materials and higher resolutions, but they cost much more. We got nice looking color pictures on our computers in the end. In time we shall get nice, smooth, hard (or soft) objects from our 3D printers. The press says 'you can make tea with these', and the average user wonders why on earth they should get excited about one. But those who understand what they are now, and also what they will become are excited.
Not interested? Well, the Internet is big these days, and I am sure you will find the lolcats, tubgirl, furry porn or whatever it is you are looking for. But the Internet was small once, and we had a lot of fun watching it grow. These are going to be interesting times for 3D printing, and we are going to have ourselves some fun all over again, and the Grinch himself cannot stop us...
Imagine "Lego Factory" a 3d printer designed to print low volume customized and/or specialized lego parts.
Imagine creating your own set of 100 lego blocks with any color you can imagine.
Of course if lego doesnt want to do that...someone else will...especially since the shape of the lego brick
is no longer legally protected as a trademark.
Uhmm, when I've read the beginning of the slashdot article didn't Star Trek came to my mind, got The HitchHiker's Guide To The Galaxy instead. Actually the episode when Arthur Dent faces the Cybernetic Sirio's Nutrimatic machine.
Did someone think the same?!
My 2bits
(Apologize for any mispells, English is not my natural language)
Well according to the publisher of Forbes the price of 3d printers has fallen by a factor of ten in the last five years, which seems to fall pretty squarely within Moore's Law and hardly seems to be "behind the curve of technological process."
Sadly i can't seem to find any exact timelines of price/performance. (Does anyone else know of one?) I don't want to just appeal to authority, but he at least actually provided figures while all you've done is trash talk the technology. So until i can find some figures to confirm or deny the claim, or unless you can refute his figures, i'm going to have to go with... you're incredibly wrong.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
And do you know why I want a cup of tea?
I bought this house and you know I'm boss
Ain't no h'aint gonna run me off
Our efforts will probably be more like HHGTG, producing "a liquid that is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea."
Only explanation is it's MS Enterprise 5.7 and user preferences are the great new groundbreaking feature in MS Enterprise 6... expected any decade now.
Nah. MS Enterprise 5.7 would just deliver a sweaty English aristocrat holding a small plastic golf-ball stand.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
However, I feel it's worth mentioning that your entire post could have been written about computers at any point from the 1940s until the mid-1980s, and they turned out to be kind of a big deal after all.
Bzzzt! Sorry, this is analogy fail. Computers did not suddenly become important in the 1980s after decades of languishing in failure to be of any real importance. They merely became a lot more available to the public at large, which transformed them from a Big Deal into an Amazingly Big Deal. Don't confuse "were too big and expensive for everybody to own one" with "didn't revolutionize a ton of things".
3D printers aren't revolutionizing anything so far. And they probably won't. GP is probably a bit too down on them (they're already useful prototyping tools for some purposes), but they just don't seem likely to have anything like the seismic impact which, say, an IBM S/360 had. (Just to pick a seminal design from the era during which you seem to think computers weren't a big deal. To give you an idea how big a deal the 360 was, IBM still sells computers compatible with the 360 today, well over 40 years past the inaugural member of the family.)
News articles of the "fluffy kind" do a disservice to people who want to know the truth about "3D printers".
The total cost of a rapid prototype or pre-production part can work out efficiently, but you need some critical items.
1. The "real" 3D model, sized for the process and the end use is needed: Functional differences will exist in the best machines depending on how the models are oriented & built. Hire a designer or get your own 3D modeling & CAD/CAM software, learn it & use it and the cost is anything but trivial. Usually at least $5k not counting your time, unless you get an educational discount.
2. The "good" 3D printers to make strong usable parts are typically SLS laser sintering machines that sinter plastic or metal powders in an inert atmosphere. You do NOT put one of these at home, unless you are Steve Jobs. Figure $500k for a good one.
3. Even the "good" parts from SLS machines often need machining and surface finishing to keep them from looking cruddy and having sizes that make fits come out wrong. I have personally spent 5 hours finishing a small RP modeled part so it would function as intended. It makes for REAL expensive parts.
The only way to keep costs down for good usable "3D printed" parts is to use a Rapid Prototyping job shop and hire or be a good designer yourself.
For true exponential replication (what I believe most of the scifi fans think of when replication is mentioned) I think we need a set of fabrication machines and assembly robots that can in combination fabricate and assemble each of the machines and the robots. These machines must be able to produce all of the components (including electronics) not just the frames and large mechanical parts. Wouldn't hurt if this set of machines could also fabricate and assemble all of the machinery needed for harvesting the raw materials. Letting mind wander off into further fantasy if the raw materials could be any old crap such as regolith we could truly say: "Now we've done it!"
this won't be widespread in my lifetime. i have a son that is 8. maybe when he's a grandfather, this will be widespread. this could be quite good for the country where the printers and consumables are made. however, i suspect it will be china so it will just be a wash. however, at some point, perhaps?, these 3d printers could get so accurate and precise that they could start 'printing' more 3d printers. 'hey, dude. if i pay for the consumables, can i print myself a 3dprinter on your 3d printer?'
All of this 3D printing is cool but I think the technology has a long way to go. This won't get much market share as the practical applications are minimal.
Let me know when these 3D printers can print me a Milla Jovovich then I'll go buy one.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
A laser could easily target something as fast as a bullet. We're talking lightspeed here... bullets move only marginally faster than mach 1.
No. The flight time of a laser beam has nothing to do with *tracking*. What sensor is detecting the incoming bullet? How many readings does it need to accurately determine a trajectory? How fast are the servo motors that point the laser? How far is the laser's current vector from the desired vector?
Did you know that they used to pull the nails out of old homes before they tore them down? True stuff. Nails were expensive. They pulled them, straightened them, and used them again. Then they started making them cheaply in bulk and it wasn't worth the time to go through a place and pull out old nails. Well, the old guard didn't think too highly of this change and for a little while in some places there were laws on the books stating that you HAD to go pull out the nails from a building.
Did you also know that there generals that didn't think much of the repeating rifle? They argued that if soldiers could fire quickly, they'd devote less time to aiming. Big waste of ammo, you know.
Progress, it's a good thing. Also, you know how you can make your own X for a lot cheaper then if you buy it from a company that would be liable for it? Yeah, there's a reason for that.
Oblig xkcd: http://xkcd.com/924
I think that printing parts could contribute to repairing things again. We used to do that in the 1950s and the 1960s, but now we throw away as the default settin, especially when we don't have a part.
I'm currently missing some simple valve components in the hot water system in my appartment, result the whole valve needs to be changed, what a waste. The current set of printers won't solve this [because it needs solid metal for the part] but they're edging towards it with sintering and laser shaping.
Of course this requires some sea-changes in our culture and economies too, maybe that's the hardest part. Perhaps we should 3d print some new leaders and politicians?
On y va, qui mal y pense!
...that it'll take a while before the tea replicators produce something that is not entirely unlike tea
I have to wonder how recyclable this stuff is. Cheap, disposable plastic crap is already a major load on our ecosystem in terms of materials cost and disposal cost. I cringe to think how much stuff will end up in landfills, and how much material will be wasted, when people are able to make cheap disposable plastic crap themselves--not to mention misprints and other waste from people using the machines incorrectly or just dicking around.
It's quite obvious that some racketeering mob will collude to fund the prosecution of as many people as possible who buy this equipment.
On the other side, I cant wait for printable buildings.
Imagine this. You park a large, what looks to be a large plastic bin on girders filled with sand on your new lot.
Over several weeks, it slowly sinters the sand into foundations and walls. Using an array of legs alternately "Stepping" on the walls it has just completed.
Fresh sand is augered up like grain.
Once it has reached the desired height, it waits for a calm day, offloads all the remaining sand and any extras that can be moved by hand. Then, a large balloon is inflated, it takes off, and drifts either pulled by ropes, or with the wind to a truck/landing point.
Tell me that wouldn't be cool.
Combo it with the solar sintering method and you could leave these things on full auto in the desert to make emergency shelters/stabilise the sand.
Maybe the question should not be when you can download the (blueprints of) a car from TPB but those of machine guns. Some pistols (like the Glock) are already made mostly of plastic, criminals and ;ynch mobs will just love it when they can print heavy artillery and ammo. Gunpowder is easy to make, I experimented already with that when I was a kid.
Hard to make plastic guns with explosive propellants; not so hard, perhaps, to make one with an accelerator track (or tracks) in it. The power supply is the main problem there, but ultracaps are moving slowly ahead too... imagine a relatively svelte sintered iron dart as the projectile, carrying something toxic at the tip, for instance.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
They're never going to sell more than 2 of these...
I think it is more likely to be one in each specialist store. We could see this bring jobs back to western economies and kill off the need for cheap foreign labor on things. The local specialist 3D printer operator will be able to make certain goods. Another will specialise with a 3D printer that makes other goods. Eventually you have what the west had 30-40 years ago where you have small local stores making things locally. Might allow the small store to come back or big supermarkets to just ship stuff from down the road rather than from China.
It's being said that these devices will never be more efficient than the huge manufacturing plants, and that's true, but is efficiency the most important thing here?
If you look at software engineering the trend is to do things -less- efficiently, in order to get a faster time to market. The reason being that the market is moving so quickly that if you attempt to setup a huge, rigid process, with full documentation to hit a target a year from now, you'll miss only for the reason that the target has moved.
As the rate of technological advance increases the time to market advantage increases, and agile companies start running rings around the more bureaucratic ones (except where a rigid process is mandated such as for safety, security or public accountability).
Manufacturing in China is cheap because they take shortcuts rather than use a massive unified process. They also use manual labour which is a million times more flexible than any machine today ("ok go start putting those pile of widgets together, put the prices on too and then load them onto the truck") and take a stab and thousands of different products to see which ones are worth putting more effort into.
I can see a day when efficiency isn't king for products, it's time to market, uniqueness and not having to store it locally. If that's the case, these could definately be the way of the future. Today we have things designed, a small production run (potentially thousands) made, errors fixed (or not, try to recoup costs on the not-so-perfect ones), another run made, then have it shipped from China to the shop and stored, then finally sold. Tomorrow it might simply be designed, tested in house, redesigned and then the design is sold. Distribution centres close to each shopping district can make a tiny production run to put into stores, and items sold online are paid for before they're even made
Sure it might be a little bit more expensive per item, but the amount of waste cut from the overall system would more than make up for it.
On the one hand you have the possible utopia of unlimited "free" stuff.
Nothing is free. Raw materials are not free, energy is not free and labor is not free. Resources are scarce and baring some real genuine miracle always will be.
And on the other, the distopia of companies locking this technology up, and firing (almost all) the workers.
Only people with absolutely no concept of economics believe that. Unless you have effectively unlimited energy and the ability to easily convert that energy into complex matter (like food) with no limit, there is a economic cost. So long as any resources are scarce, human needs and economics are a part of the equation.
Is there any unwavering indicator one way or the other? Is there any unwavering indicator one way or the other?
False choice. Neither is possible. It is impossible to remove scarcity completely from the human experience.
In Star Trek, they've had enough time to get past the awful mistakes we make in computers now.
The replicator doesn't have any hidden settings, preferences dialog, user-anticipation, or auto-tuning. There's no first-time setup wizard, advanced configuration, recommendations based on your prior purchases, or new user help balloons. When it doesn't give you what you want, it's because you didn't ask for the right thing, and it doesn't leave you wondering about some hidden internal state. The only feedback required is a subtle acknowledgement that your request is understood and being processed, or an explanation when it can't be performed.
The UI is minimal and easy. I think it's a wonderful design.
When the 'Drink' button is pressed it makes an instant but highly detailed examination of the subject's taste buds, a spectroscopic analysis of the subject's metabolism, and then sends tiny experimental signals down the neural pathways to the taste centres of the subject's brain to see what is likely to be well received. However, no-one knows quite why it does this because it then invariably delivers a cupful of liquid that is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.
My house is far LESS likely to "collapse and kill someone" because the materials it is made out of are significantly stronger and better braced and better fastened than anything you're likely to find as the output of a typical contractor. Even the stairs have triple the usual support (3x 2x10" + trusses, like bridge construction.) It is LESS likely to burn, because it actually has excellent built-in fire suppression systems, not to mention it has exactly ZERO electrical junctions within its walls and all electrical AC cabling is heavy gauge to 20 amp outlets, where every single load has its own breaker AND sub-breaker, not to mention GFI outlets on just about every line. The floors are thrice as thick, and the trusses that support them twice as dense and a third again as hefty, as the code would have a contractor use. You could park a loaded pickup truck in my bedroom and the floor wouldn't deform. Building to code is FAR less strict than what we did here; my home makes any "standard" built home look like the proverbial pig's straw house.
Again, you leap to unwarranted assumptions. I know exactly how to install a furnace. I don't need any help doing it. At all. If I had to, I could *build* a furnace, including a modern safety ignition controller and sequencer. As it happens, I didn't build ours -- there were acceptable units available -- but I *did* build the power failover system for it. When the power fails around here in the winter, guess whose house still has heat and power for critical utilities? That's right: mine. Safe as heck, too.
In a word, yes. It's mine. Not yours. You are not my mother. It's MY decision if I want to hand off that responsibility to a third party, and I don't -- because standard construction techniques bring numerous inherent flaws and shortcomings that I don't intend to have in my home. If I sold my home to you (not likely, it's willed to my kids), no matter who, or how, it was built, you should inspect every detail about it before you commit to buying. And you could; every wall interior and floor interior is safely and easily accessible, every fastener can be non-destructively removed and re-applied, every AC line has pre- and post-attachment resistance test points, every breaker has a current monitor, every inch of plumbing, in and out, is accessible right to the city-owned lines, all non-power cabling is routed sensibly and may be removed, updated, etc., with almost no extra work. The exterior is covered with fireproof material, as is the roof, and again, there are appropriately located fire suppression systems even so. The roof structure is comprised by double the number of trusses that are "standard" for its size (which is quite large), and they are enhanced with three types of specific reinforcement for high wind survivability (this is tornado country.) The windows are multi-layer Lexan, the exterior doors steel, and the house is equipped with 16-channels of security monitoring onto several terabytes (several days worth) of recordings. The exterior insulation FAR exceeds the norm (both in thickness and in R value) for this latitude, is non-toxic, fully removable and fully maintainable because as I mentioned previously, you can get into any wall without a problem and I designed it so that it would be maintainable.
And you know what? There are a lot of places in the US where I could not have built this house this way. Because "the community" is stupid. It acts by rote; not by thoughtful cognition. I'd just as soon y'all stayed as far away from me as possible.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Did you know that they used to pull the nails out of old homes before they tore them down?
Did you know that in some countries they think we're big fucking idiots for using nails, when you could be using screws which are easier to remove and reuse, and which also preserve the lumber in superior condition for reuse? Oh, and screws hold the structures together better to begin with?
Did you also know that there generals that didn't think much of the repeating rifle? They argued that if soldiers could fire quickly, they'd devote less time to aiming. Big waste of ammo, you know.
Did you know that the number of rounds expended per kill has gone up by an order of magnitude since the automatic rifle was implemented in warfare?
Progress, it's a good thing, we should try it.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Because bullets are.
And so are explosives, grenades and various other area-effect "tools" that one could use to disable/destroy that very expensive laser.
So not only would the enemy kill you (cheaply), they'd bankrupt you as well.
Also, unless the laser would actually vaporize incoming bullets, the entire thing just turns into a statistical exercise.
Cause, as we all know - where there is one bullet, there are more bullet.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Morally, USA is a far greater "evil" than Nazi Germany.
Morally, drinking Coca-Cola is an immoral act. Or Lipton tea. Or Pepsi.
Using anything made in China is utterly fucking immoral.
And don't get me started on driving around/having your stuff driven to you using Saudi oil.
At the same time, it used to be perfectly moral to have yourself a herd of human cattle - not so long ago.
You could hunt them, kill them, skin them, cook them, fuck them (not necessarily in that order) - and no one would say that is immoral.
Now, you can only do all that to your human cattle only in certain countries. People in other countries find it immoral.
Well... unless you pay your cattle some trivial amount of money, then many of those things suddenly become perfectly moral.
Except fucking them.
THAT'S fucking immoral.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Uh, Drinkypoo, you're usually pretty insightful around here, but you're a little off the mark.
Screws are better because they hold the wood together more firmly. They don't take them out and reuse them. Nor do they use the wood again out of old houses. It's used lumber and hardware from ancient decaying houses. I wouldn't want my house built with used hardware. And this stuff is cheap enough that it's really not an issue. Old houses get scavenged and then torn down. The scavenging doesn't include the bloody FRAME of the house.
And... dear god. Automatic fire was leaps and bounds better then rifles with a slow and cumbersome reload. The argument that it wastes ammo was supposed to be ludicrous.
Drinky. An important first step is recognizing progress.
Turrets which can be knocked over by a stiff breeze ARE NOT adequate protection from actors performing any kind of kinetic attacks.
Why use bullets at all then?
If the laser is sufficiently destructible, just toss rocks at it. Or fart in its general direction.
On the other hand, why use lasers at all?
A thin sheet of paper with "Please don't shoot. Thank you." printed on it in large enough letters should do just as well.
AND it is a lot cheaper.
AND biodegradable.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Well, I'm an engineer who has worked both ends of the spectrum - aerospace and construction. "Disposable" has it's place, no doubt, but durability is often underrated in many things.
As you mentioned, they don't pull and reuse nails because today that isn't cost effective (mat'l vs labor). The key is that nails are still made of steel. If you were to make a nail of sintered pot metal (or whatever the substance is on a 3D printer), it's not going to have the mechanical properties of a traditional nail, and though it may work just find under low loads, it will fail under higher - or perhaps just cyclic - loading.
You might liken the change to either screws or to "gun" nails. Gun nails aren't nearly as good as "old" nails, mostly because you can pneumatically drive a thinner nail than you can hand drive. So a 3.25" long nail can be driven with a 0.131" diameter, whereas a hand driven 3.25" nail (aka 16d or 16 penny common) will be 0.162" diameter. Shear and withdrawal resistance is proportional to nail diameter, so a 16d "gun" nail isn't nearly as strong as a 16d hand nail.
Do you know why screws are frowned upon in construction? It's because they are not a ductile as nails, and tend to fail in a brittle way. That makes them lousy as connectors in seismic events. Nails help ensure a wide hysteresis loop that allows lumber structures to dissipate seismic energy and survive far beyond their calculated strength (they get 2x the strength bonus vs hot rolled steel, and 4-5x bonus over masonry per lb of static resistance).
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Progress is finding ways NOT to kill people.
The wood taken from "old" houses can be reused for other purposes instead of taken to landfill as we commonly do here in the USA.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Only after you tear off the shingles, the siding, the insulation, the drywall, the venting, all the stuff inside, and the fixtures (you cut power right?).
THEN you have access to the frame of the house. But you're going to have to built some scaffolding around it or rent a lot of cherrypickers if you want to PULL THE NAILS (or screws). And all that said and done, you have a few peices of crappy 2x4s. Turns out, with today's labor prices and the availability of lumber, it's cheaper to go chop down another tree.
Sorry Dink, the free-market forces are right about this one. It ain't worth it.
(The fixtures and the various copper sources in old houses can be worth it though. That's why you hear about scavangers electrocuting themselves every now and then. You don't hear about the roof falling on lumber scavengers.)
I will eat my own hat if you have deconstructed a house and have have pictures of you harvesting the old lumber.
As for progress and war, shrug, that gets into philosophy. Which is mostly pointless. You might be more right here then about lumber, but if push came to shove, I'd rather have a machine gun then a flint lock.
Huh. I thought they were just slower to work with. The more you know, eh?
You don't build scaffolding, you erect it. I myself have a piece of scaffolding, I'm using it to access the roof of a 1962 travel trailer I'm working on (just ordered two big sheets of .063 AlClad...) and it stacks together like Legos or something. (I would say K'Nex, but since it's just pegs into holes, Legos are more apt.)
if push came to shove, I'd rather have a machine gun then a flint lock.
I guess it depends on what kind of pushing and shoving is going on. If your life depends on your gun then you might as well forget it because there's always more of them than there are of you over a sufficiently long time scale. I think your life depends on your community and then it doesn't matter too much what kind of guns you have because it's guerilla warfare all the way. And then you're going to want to conserve ammo, and anything more than a semi-automatic is going to be just a wasteful lead hose.
Anyway, all that stuff COULD be ripped off of houses, and if the TRUE cost of lumber were actually accounted for in dollars and cents, then it WOULD be, and we WOULD re-use the lumber. Unfortunately, no one is being held accountable for the environmental cost of logging. The same is true for countless other industries which enjoy legal protection from a corrupt government. Big Oil leaps directly to mind; BP is sitting on the patent for cost-effectively producing Butanol and actually suing the only people trying to actually make the stuff. Butanol is a clean, green direct replacement for gasoline; you can imagine why BP would be terrified that someone might actually produce it in quantity. Meanwhile we don't pay enough gasoline taxes to pay for the environmental cleanup of the gasoline (and attendant) emissions, and even if we did, the money would hardly be spent on bioremediation.
However, this has nothing whatsoever to do with a free market. Managed trade is not free trade.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I've given this one a little bit of thought.
Scaffolding. Neat. But you're getting nitpicky and/or argumentative.
War. Lemme rephrase that. I'd rather the army that I support to defend me be armed with machine guns rather then flintlocks.
Salvage. Now here you bring up a good idea. Getting the "true cost" of lumber to be reflected. A tax or a equal replanting system to account for environmental damage. And something similar for risks of environmental damage. That's the insightful Drinkypoo I know and love.
Free market. It doesn't exist. A pure, true, absolute, the-real-deal free market simply doesn't exist outside of theory. It's one of those things that people work towards. Governments exist, natural monopolies exist, people have friends, and no one is perfectly rational and well-informed. So don't go off into the deep end and say that the price of lumber doesn't have anything to do with the free market. The USA has a pretty damn free market. Historically speaking. Could be better. But if I go down to the store and buy a plank, there are free market forces at work determining how much it's going to cost me.