Interesting Article "Makers unite - the revolution will be home-made"

Makers unite - the revolution will be home-made

Hi Fivetide

I caught that one as well and pretty much what I was saying on another thread. Shame The Ministry of Truth had to throw Marx into the mix, but there is a lot of interest in essentially throwing off mass production and the globalised logistics chain that goes with it.

Personally I found this to be a better analysis (even though it is evangalism of sorts) and I think from a US perspective is a move to try and deshackle their economy in some way from Chinese manufacturing/imports Scott Summit - interesting times are ahead :-)

I'll look at the video when I get home, but I agree, I’d also like to point out that it’s a the reverse of the original industrial revolution as it was home weavers that were pressed into huge factory’s mass producing materials. That took out each weaver’s ability to come up with new patterns or experiment with threads. We are “encouraged” to work from home, but that’s to do with lowering their overheads. One of the reason I started my garage project was because my grandfather was a well-respected master cabinet maker, we still have several items of his and we have been contacted by owners of his cabinets asking for information to give it providence. What I do is judged by how often I’m contacted; the less work I do means the fewer problems there are. Therefore, the less I’m contacted by users the more efficient I ‘am. I do quite frankly nothing, I may have put in two hours’ work in the last week and I’m paid pretty well for it. You would think that would make me happy, but it doesn’t. You see I’m only seen as the person who’s “system” does not work. Last year my system was down for 4 hours out of 8766 2 of which were out of hour’s maintenance, and two of which were BT’s fault because they cut through the optical fiber link. My entire year was summed up in a annual meeting as, system not available for 4 hours. Not .. system was available for 8762 hours out of 8766 or 99.2 % !! So I want to make things , I want to make things that make people smile, that they want to treasure and keep, then pass onto their children, like my grandfather did.

Rant over .. back to screen that hasn’t changed in 18 weeks ..

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Fivetide

... What I do is judged by how often I’m contacted; the less work I do means the fewer problems there are. Therefore, the less I’m contacted by users the more efficient I ‘am. I do quite frankly nothing, I may have put in two hours’ work in the last week and I’m paid pretty well for it. You would think that would make me happy, but it doesn’t. You see I’m only seen as the person who’s “system” does not work. Last year my system was down for 4 hours out of 8766 2 of which were out of hour’s maintenance, and two of which were BT’s fault because they cut through the optical fiber link. My entire year was summed up in a annual meeting as, system not available for 4 hours. Not .. system was available for 8762 hours out of 8766 or 99.2 % !!

So I want to make things , I want to make things that make people smile, that they want to treasure and keep, then pass onto their children, like my grandfather did.

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Nice thread.... I can relate totally to that last sentence Fivetide!

As an old cynic I can recall thinking way back then... that it might even be worthwhile to let errors occasionally slip through just to get a bit of positive exposure from the fixing of the errors. I never did, but it struck me that the gauge of doing a good job was... well, a tad negative.

I think the first video is great. It's like the old idiom 'give a man a fish...'. Lots of charities try to provide tools for poor countries to do work but they can only be used for that specific job in most cases. Instead of giving each man a spade, give his town a CNC machine and they can make many, many things they all need. Alright, it may be slower to make spades that way, but on the other hand they can make so many other things no-one would have thought to give them.

The video is about a business wanting $50,000 which I can't imagine many African towns affording. If this was a charity project to build and ship 'factories in a box' or just the CNC machines to poor African areas I imagine it could do a lot of good indeed. Alternatively I guess a charity group could tour one, 3 months in each town making stuff then on to the next town.