Major points taken of course, but fountain pens were later. When I started primary school we still had ink wells in our desks (and inky fingers; smile).
'Globalisation' was the 'next big thing' to add to 'economies of scale'. and fossil fuel energy still cheap enough to scale-up? China electrified on vast domestic coal expansion (a one off). And the digital world enabled vast complexity.
What is the 'next big thing' and where is the cheap (and 'energy cheap') fuel to come from? And materials?
PS liked your film about British sewage ... hope 'we' can afford it ... lots of issues ... toxics as well as ordinary NPK flushing through the system ...
I recall the existential dread of going from third to forth grade because that's when we had to start using pen and ink instead of erasable pencil. And it really WAS bad.
Predicting the future is hard, but my guess is that it will come from a combination of being able to transmit and store (including in the form of carbon capture and sequestration) the near zero marginal cost of solar and wind energy at their intermittent peaks.
The 'next big thing' is supposed to be AI, together with autonomous flexible robots that can be just "plugged in" to existing processes to substitute for human labour. These will somehow compensate for deglobalisation.
I am skeptical. We have had Roombas for 20 years and they still can't vacuum floors properly, let alone do any dusting, clean the windows, or tidy the kids' bedrooms. As Elon Musk said after reverting an attempt to automate a Tesla factory, "humans are underrated".
This reminds me of the realisation back in the early 2010s that every iPhone shipped from Foxconn was probably a net import into China on a passthrough basis, once you reckoned up the processor fabbed by Samsung or TSMC in Taiwan or Austin, TX, the modem from Qualcomm, the Bluetooth and WiFi radios (from CSR to begin with), the touchscreen from Corning, plus the use of the Apple-specific machine tools and a bunch of intangible contributions.
it was one of the biggest things that mobile industry analysts had to get their heads around at that time - the whole "designed by Apple in California", everything is just intellectual property rights concept was dead and suddenly everything was manufacturing. this was, btw, Tim Cook's signature achievement as he ran first Mac hardware engineering and then iPhone supply chain; the big insight from the various bevelled corner lawsuits was that at the end of the day, fluff patents didn't work as a competitive moat but replicating the manufacturing machine would be incredibly difficult.
Indeed difficult, but carbon capture is a form of significant energy consumption. Meanwhile all our food for example gets delivered in diesel trucks on concrete and tarmac roads (maintained) ,while there is huge (fossil-fuelled) investment needed in innovation let alone actual new infrastructure. We ride on the back of legacy structures and prior investment? The going was easy!
I'd be far more comfortable with this work/world view if I felt Adam Smiths invisible hand was controlling the course of events more than the steel gauntleted bludgeon holding hands of (We're from and we're here to help) governments.
Major points taken of course, but fountain pens were later. When I started primary school we still had ink wells in our desks (and inky fingers; smile).
'Globalisation' was the 'next big thing' to add to 'economies of scale'. and fossil fuel energy still cheap enough to scale-up? China electrified on vast domestic coal expansion (a one off). And the digital world enabled vast complexity.
What is the 'next big thing' and where is the cheap (and 'energy cheap') fuel to come from? And materials?
PS liked your film about British sewage ... hope 'we' can afford it ... lots of issues ... toxics as well as ordinary NPK flushing through the system ...
I recall the existential dread of going from third to forth grade because that's when we had to start using pen and ink instead of erasable pencil. And it really WAS bad.
Predicting the future is hard, but my guess is that it will come from a combination of being able to transmit and store (including in the form of carbon capture and sequestration) the near zero marginal cost of solar and wind energy at their intermittent peaks.
The 'next big thing' is supposed to be AI, together with autonomous flexible robots that can be just "plugged in" to existing processes to substitute for human labour. These will somehow compensate for deglobalisation.
I am skeptical. We have had Roombas for 20 years and they still can't vacuum floors properly, let alone do any dusting, clean the windows, or tidy the kids' bedrooms. As Elon Musk said after reverting an attempt to automate a Tesla factory, "humans are underrated".
This reminds me of the realisation back in the early 2010s that every iPhone shipped from Foxconn was probably a net import into China on a passthrough basis, once you reckoned up the processor fabbed by Samsung or TSMC in Taiwan or Austin, TX, the modem from Qualcomm, the Bluetooth and WiFi radios (from CSR to begin with), the touchscreen from Corning, plus the use of the Apple-specific machine tools and a bunch of intangible contributions.
it was one of the biggest things that mobile industry analysts had to get their heads around at that time - the whole "designed by Apple in California", everything is just intellectual property rights concept was dead and suddenly everything was manufacturing. this was, btw, Tim Cook's signature achievement as he ran first Mac hardware engineering and then iPhone supply chain; the big insight from the various bevelled corner lawsuits was that at the end of the day, fluff patents didn't work as a competitive moat but replicating the manufacturing machine would be incredibly difficult.
Indeed difficult, but carbon capture is a form of significant energy consumption. Meanwhile all our food for example gets delivered in diesel trucks on concrete and tarmac roads (maintained) ,while there is huge (fossil-fuelled) investment needed in innovation let alone actual new infrastructure. We ride on the back of legacy structures and prior investment? The going was easy!
I'd be far more comfortable with this work/world view if I felt Adam Smiths invisible hand was controlling the course of events more than the steel gauntleted bludgeon holding hands of (We're from and we're here to help) governments.
Not unexpected to anyone who ever read "I pencil." https://fee.org/resources/i-pencil/