Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Helgoland]

There's an old joke: A Bundeswehr recruit is assigned to the cook and ordered to peel a small mountain of potatoes for the unit's lunch. He despairs at the sheer amount of work and complains to his officer: 'Isn't there a machine to do this work?' 'Yes. You are the latest model.'

[evilcherry]

And how much advanced electronics actually NEED the labour for its production? How much business actually NEED the people in making decisions? Without a physical storefront why would you need anyone other than a fully mechanized warehouse?

Well all that mechanization stuff is very expensive to setup.  It's probably cheaper to hire humans for the length of time it would take for your automated process to become obsolete.

At one point I was doing plastic and metal work using equipment that was holdovers from the 70s.  I as I remember, that the market value of the parts I was making was upwards of 100 dollars an hour.  But I was only doing it part time because the market for these parts was pretty small.  There was no need to setup a super automated process for all this stuff when you could instead hire one semi-skilled laborer.  Certain a robot could have done that job better then me, but a robot wasn't needed.  The same thing holds to a lesser extent with any production.  A robot CAN drive a car, but the price of a robot needs to be low enough to replace a given driver.  A robot can replace an assembly line worker but different tasks have different robotic and non robotic costs.

At least you are enjoying your job. When job satisfaction is at an level that you won't feel alienated traditional Marxist economy breaks down.

Back to the decision making part, though. A lot of low-level decision making is based on contingencies: I work for a factory (well, we remote control things cross national borders). Today we discovered that one of our suppliers has delivered the wrong kind of label. Turn out that it is one of the very usual causes: because one of the people in the whole command and supply pipeline don't read the F__king manual. In an ideal world, when we received an order for a recurring item, we should immediately place an order for all its materials, using specifications as last time, and the suppliers would immediately arrange to deliver the goods, and so on. Every step is a potential cause of error if a human is involved. If we can automate the whole ordering process, we can at least eliminate these kind of human errors. Yet we are still 100% by hand. Oh my oh my oh my.

[Urist McScoopbeard]

so... how 'bout that election? Neat, right?

[mainiac]

so... how 'bout that election? Neat, right?

Democratic side is going to be pretty straightforward.  538 noted recently that Ted Cruz might be the least unelectable of the fringe candidates which is a crazy distinction to be pointing out.

[Urist McScoopbeard]

Democratic side is going to be pretty straightforward.  538 noted recently that Ted Cruz might be the least unelectable of the fringe candidates which is a crazy distinction to be pointing out.

Interesting. God do I hate American News Media.

[Zangi]

There's an old joke: A Bundeswehr recruit is assigned to the cook and ordered to peel a small mountain of potatoes for the unit's lunch. He despairs at the sheer amount of work and complains to his officer: 'Isn't there a machine to do this work?' 'Yes. You are the latest model.'

Alternatively: 'Yes, but you are cheaper.' or 'Yes, but do you want to keep your job here?'

[mainiac]

'Yes, but do you want to keep your job here?'

Well it's the Bundeswehr so probably not.  And it's the Budeswehr so the recruit is probably waaaay more expensive then the machine but the law says they need to draft him anyway.

There was a story about a dude in the Bundeswehr who was told to sit at a desk and wait for a phone to ring then answer the questions.  After three weeks he noticed that the phone wasn't plugged into the telephone jack.

[PTTG??]

The good news is that PACs have allowed non-party funding to explode, which in turn allowed the "freedom caucus" to operate relatively freely from the republican party, and that in turn has brought about the rapid decay of the republican party that may shortly result in total implosion.

The bad news is that the Democratic party is about as organized as a sack of cats. The fact that they're more organized than the republicans is.... impressive but not in a positive sense. The Democratic strategy seems to remain "Become Republican."

[Lord Shonus]

Plus you can't really automate an inspection, and that's what a good deal of manufacturing jobs boil down to.

Actually I'd say that inspections are honestly one of the easiest things to automate. A machine set up with some basic sensors and a list of requirements can make sure that every single part meets those requirements every single time, or can even randomly select from a group if that's what it needs to do, and will do so with much more reliability than a human inspector will.

No, it cannot. A single highly machined but very simple part needs many different checks which have to be done within the time that the next part is being made (so any errors that come in from the machine warming up early in a run, the machine cooling down near the end of a run, or tool wear) are fixed immediately. For example, a simple cylinder of bronze made as a blank for later machining (allowing a company to buy large numbers of blanks that can be made into a variety of parts with only a small amount of machining, bringing costs way down) requires a length check, a check of the inner diameter and outer diameter of each end (to detect the very common taper), wall thickness checks (at least 8 per end), and squareness checks on each end. All of which must be done in the 48.4 seconds before you have to open the lathe, remove the next part, and shove in another bar of bronze.

If it's even possible (which it probably is not) Building a robot that could do all that would cost millions of dollars and probably only be capable of testing that exact part and possibly close cousins, for a part that brings in around a hundred thousand dollars a year. Anyone who suggested such a thing would be fired on the spot.

[Descan]

... They have machines that can do that NOW. What?

[Bauglir]

That sounds pretty straightforward to engineer, actually. Probably build something that sweeps lasers or something across the surfaces of the object to get data on the piece, and compares it to 3D models saved in software. Expensive and time consuming, certainly, but the robot manufacturer would presumably be selling to dozens of machining clients that do the actual cylinder manufacturing (and whatever else the machine can handle) and would probably generate most of their revenue from a leasing arrangement that guarantees perpetual income, but is priced to be cheaper than labor.

The reasons I wouldn't expect to see it happen are that the current system works just fine, any unions that have managed to stagger on to the present day would oppose the shit out of it, and if something does go wrong with the software it's likely to go uncorrected for a larger length of time than with a human so that the cost of an error is an entire shipment. And people are so risk-averse, especially when (and I cannot stress this enough) the current system works, that you'd need way better than an expected profit. The cost-benefit analysis would have to be overwhelming for an established business to switch, and unless I miss my guess entry costs are going to make it hard for any new manufacturing businesses to get started with an automated version from the get-go.

[Lord Shonus]

That sounds pretty straightforward to engineer, actually. Probably build something that sweeps lasers or something across the surfaces of the object to get data on the piece, and compares it to 3D models saved in software. Expensive and time consuming, certainly, but the robot manufacturer would presumably be selling to dozens of machining clients that do the actual cylinder manufacturing (and whatever else the machine can handle) and would probably generate most of their revenue from a leasing arrangement that guarantees perpetual income, but is priced to be cheaper than labor.

The problem is time - if it cannot do the job in less time than it takes to make the part, you WILL have thousands of dollars worth of wasted parts every single day, because you have to make continuous adjustments to the machine (sometimes as few as five in an hour, often more) as the tools wear out and the machine shifts operating temperature, and every single part has to be checked to do that. The very best machines that do automated or semiautomated inspections do as many parts in a day or two as a machinist can test in an hour, which is why they have a strong market in QC labs (where you take the first part of a run or do random-sample testing of the finished batch) but nowhere else.

How do I know this? Not only have I spent a lot of time in machine shops personally, have the rough equivalent of an Associate's Degree (was supposed to have the degree, but my school's university partner got pissy because we didn't ban calculators from the math department and decided that all the credits that were supposed to count as college didn't) in Industrial Automation, and have family or close friends in at least half of the machining industry in this city.

[Baffler]

That sounds pretty straightforward to engineer, actually. Probably build something that sweeps lasers or something across the surfaces of the object to get data on the piece, and compares it to 3D models saved in software. Expensive and time consuming, certainly, but the robot manufacturer would presumably be selling to dozens of machining clients that do the actual cylinder manufacturing (and whatever else the machine can handle) and would probably generate most of their revenue from a leasing arrangement that guarantees perpetual income, but is priced to be cheaper than labor.

The problem is time - if it cannot do the job in less time than it takes to make the part, you WILL have thousands of dollars worth of wasted parts every single day, because you have to make continuous adjustments to the machine (sometimes as few as five in an hour, often more) as the tools wear out and the machine shifts operating temperature, and every single part has to be checked to do that. The very best machines that do automated or semiautomated inspections do as many parts in a day or two as a machinist can test in an hour, which is why they have a strong market in QC labs (where you take the first part of a run or do random-sample testing of the finished batch) but nowhere else.

This. If a batch is fucked and has to be sent back to be machined again, that's a big problem. Lots of wasted time. If a batch gets finished two weeks late because the machines can't work any faster that's a disaster, because the shop has probably permanently lost at least two customers. This is one of those rare cases where a human worker is objectively better than a machine at a manual task.

[Sheb]

Still, I don't know why you seem so sure that a machine that scan a part for defect would be so hard to create.

[TheBiggerFish]

How do I know this? Not only have I spent a lot of time in machine shops personally, have the rough equivalent of an Associate's Degree (was supposed to have the degree, but my school's university partner got pissy because we didn't ban calculators from the math department and decided that all the credits that were supposed to count as college didn't) in Industrial Automation, and have family or close friends in at least half of the machining industry in this city.

I smell lawsuits...

Still, I don't know why you seem so sure that a machine that scan a part for defect would be so hard to create.

Because it is?  There's a reason we're not using them.
Machines are not good at fiddly bits.
At best, they're good at a single fiddly bit, and often slower than a guy with a tape measure.