On 2019-09-20 12:25, Zenaan Harkness wrote:
I am confident I could learn to make a pencil, work to obtain required tools and inputs, and make a pencil.
If you had even started to think about what would be necessary to make a pencil, you would have sketched in an outline of how you would go about it. How for example, would you form graphite into pencil leads? How do you form anything? With your bare hands? What tools would you need? Hint: You cannot buy a machine for forming pencil leads, because that kind of machine is a one off - most machines for forming specific shapes are one offs. You have to make the machine, just as Ivan the Troll had to make one off devices that formed high strength, high melting point steel into gun parts, for those parts of a gun where one cannot use anything more easily shapeable, those parts where one cannot use a threedee printer or a numerically controlled lathe. And the fact that you have not sketched an outline tells me that you lack the knowledge to even think about what would be needed. Machines exist for making arbitrary threedee shapes using additive or subtractive technologies, but there are rather severe limits to the materials they can shape, and the shapes they can achieve, so that in practice you wind up using several such devices to make the things that make the things that make the thing that you actually want to make. They cannot shape pencil lead or wood, or rather they can, but not to the shapes you need for a pencil. So you would need to think about the kind of devices you would need for making a pencil, and then think about how to make those devices.
- a functional family requires interpersonal cohesion
- a functional restaurant ditto
- functional manufacturer ditto
Shockley was notoriously terrible at that, but he founded all of modern electronics. Steve Jobs was mighty bad at that also, but Apple was only able to make groundbreaking new products when Steve Jobs was at the helm. When they put Wernher von Braun in charge of what became NASA, they did not tell him he had to get on with people. They told other people that they had to get on with Wernher von Braun. He was not put in charge of NASA for his interpersonal skills, but because he could make rockets, and other people could not make rockets, even with his advice and information. Nah, what you need to make stuff is knowing how to make stuff. That is what in short supply. Interpersonal skills are worth ten cents a bale, but only if already baled. Interpersonal skills are inherently valuable only in the way water is inherently valuable. Water is not valuable, because we have plenty of water. There is a sense in which water is more valuable than diamonds, but nobody cares and nobody should care.