OT-Left Behind

Nasty! It's too bad the gov't won't pay to move the people (-if- they would accept it) out of that horrible air.

But they're starting to use some of our money to clean it up, build hydroelectric dams, put up windmill farms, set up solar, etc. wiki

-- Accept the pain, cherish the joys, resolve the regrets; then can come the best of benedictions - 'If I had my life to live over, I'd do it all the same.' -- Joan McIntosh

Really? Small shops do, like where I work. I've gotten sketches on napkins and a shim traced onto the bottom of a cardboard box with no dimensions and then that image faxed to us. Of course, the faxing meant all scale was lost. I called to get some dimensions and they said they had sent the box with the tracing over. Someone had shown up at our loading dock and, without explanation, handed the empty box to "someone". I wonder how long that box bounced around the dock before it was canned? With a little guestimating, I was able to make a DXF we could cut. I measured the round box manufacturer's logo showing on the FAX, compared it to similar logos on other boxes, and came up with numbers close enough to fractional dimensions to make a dimensioned drawing to send to the customer for approval. It worked!

You'd be surprised how many dodos there are still out there.

Yes, once you have something to load into the software.

I think you missed his point. The savings isn't in electricity, it's in labor. The only reason we don't run lights out all weekend is that we have to have a LASER operator checking to make sure the machines are still cutting properly. If a machine loses its cut, we can end up with a weekend's worth of scrap. We have 14kw among our 4 LASERS and keeping the lights on is trivial, but we can get lots of cutting done with almost no labor.

No shortage of growth, it's just not occurring within our borders.

David

I've been flat out refusing that sort of work for five years and discouraging it for a decade. Any customer that can't tell me what they want isn't a customer with the exception of people who want to contract for product designs. I do some of that but it isn't "included" or for free. Pushing costs down the chain onto vendors is the oldest trick in the book. Unless someone wants to pay for it, I won't do it anymore and it's less and less expected.

I don't think I know even a single one. They can all use micrometer's as well and if they can't, they aren't machinists. They are button pushers.

Or like your example, create it.

No, you did. There isn't any labor on the premises because there isn't anything for that labor to do. Peeps would be working if there were. What Dan said was that the purpose of arranging things this way was to save the cost of electricity expended on graveyard. That's ridiculous and ignores the fact that the labor component in the actual process is tiny.

You can sense all of that. Modern MAZAK's, for example, will know if they lose a cut and restart. The same is true with Wire EDM machines.Neither is a labor intensive operation and never has been. Milling machines with tool sensors can be programmed to sense a broken tool, pick up a sister tool and go back and recut something if a tool breaks. Add a pallet changer and your are good to go, sometimes for days at a time.

Manufacturing output continues to climb. So are experts but its been a little up and down. As I said, there are a lot of structural impediments to hiring right now. Capital formation has been given huge incentives at the expense of profit taking and labor.

Sometimes large customers have small jobs for us. Or its another shop that we cut for as a favor, and they mill or turn gratis in return. Sometimes there are donuts involved...

You should see some of the artwork I've turned into something we can cut! Keeps me from getting bored doing yet another GE Medical cabinet.

No donuts for you!

I know a 75 year old tool & die maker who uses AutoCAD in his one man shop for design, but all the cutting is manual. He's barely competitive, but still can do things an engineer with CAD/CAM and 5 axis machines can't.

At some point, someone has to create it. One of our biggest problems is the clowns just released into the world with an engineering degree who don't know how to design stuff. I had to point out to the D&E dept of one of the two largest mining equipment makers (both local to Milwaukee) that it was a bad idea to have the 1/4-20 screws holding on an access panel go into holes tapped in 14 gauge steel. They agreed with my suggestion for weld nuts on the inside of the assembly.

So you're saying that the savings is electricity is more than the savings in labor by not needing anyone working on the premises? Silly me, I thought the main point of lights out was the savings on labor.

Two of our four LASERS are modern MAZAKs and if you think that's how they work, guess again. Or do you believe what the MAZAK salesmen tell you? My boss did...at first.

Yes, fewer people making more, which means fewer to buy what's made.

David

I use Interflux for this sort of thing. I understand you can get DXF out of scanned images using Illustrator directly but it was always such a pain.

Guess not.

I did my apprenticeship as a mold maker in the sixties.

That's what will change. Beginning in the late 70's it made good sense to give capital an advantage. We began a tech revolution that needed a lot of investment. That is not the case today but tax and capital structures haven't caught up with reality. They are going to start. When? I don't know. A lot of the productivity benefits that have flowed into capital and profits are now going to have to be redirected into labor or the American consumer will be to feeble to drive the economy forcefully. What happens in an economy 70 percent driven by consumer spending has financially impaired consumers is what we are seeing today. Poor performance in recovery. Unfunded government. You know, bad stuff. No first world economy operates with the income disparity that has grown up in America. It's the hallmark of a banana republic, which is what America has become.

Yup, raster to vector is usually iffy but with most artwork precision isn't a big deal. OTOH, I had a customer complain about a curve on his sign not being smooth enough when he looked at it from 10". The sign was intended to be 15' off the ground. Sigh...

I don't know of any apprenticeship programs anymore locally.

I'll hold my breath.

So far, they've been redirected into the owner's pockets, productivity goes up, profits go up, the guy doing the work at the bottom gets the same real dollar value as he did 15 years ago.

Hey mister tally man, tally me banana, daylight come an' me wanna go home.

David

Good luck with that! I have had an open work order for 16 months on an intermittent phone line. Sometimes I can't get a dial tone, or it's so noisy that I can't use it, but it's still not fixed.

More from the 'All stupid children pushed ahead' crap. :(

So explain why the guy doing the work should get more real dollar value than he got 15 years ago. Is he better educated? Does he work faster? Is it harder to find a replacement if he quits?

The owner invested in new equipment in order to raise productivity. The worker got paid for the work he did, but he did not do anything to raise productivity.

I like more money as much as anyone, but always thought I had to find ways to be more productive to justify getting raises. So I did things as teach others how to do my job so I could move on to jobs that required more skill. Or came up with better documentation so when something happened, I could find out the reason faster.

Dan

That sounds like a resistor problem.

You nailed it on the last one. No it is not harder to find a replacement and the entire economic system has been structured to produce that result.

In the last 25 years the changes to the political system has been a grand assault on the working man

The system is broke for only one reason:

The American consumer has been driven to a sufficient level of insecurity that they aren't going to play the game anymore

The American consumer is insecure about the fact they don't know if next week their job, home, health ins. and retirement will disappear

And they can't even dream about a raise despite having to work harder and produce more than ever

But now is time to pay the piper... \ The American consumer is on strike The strike has been going on for 3 years and is likely to continue indefinitely until the underlying problems are addressed

Wages have not much to do with productivity. If it did wages would have increased more - a whole lot more - since worker productivity has skyrocketed in the last 15 or so years.

My wife calls that "No teacher left standing" . Guess what she does for a living ?

Wages has everything to do with productivity. Worker productivity has not gone up in the last 15 or so years. The manufacturing productivity has gone up, but not do to anything the average worker did. That was my point. The average worker gets the same relative wage because what he contributes is pretty much the same as what he did 15 years ago. The owner bought new better machinery which increased productivity. The average worker did zip.

My wages went up because I invested time in learning and devised ways to improve the speed with which I accomplished my job.

Dan

So explain why the guy doing the work should get more real dollar value than he got 15 years ago. Is he better educated? Does he work faster? Is it harder to find a replacement if he quits?

The owner invested in new equipment in order to raise productivity. The worker got paid for the work he did, but he did not do anything to raise productivity.

I like more money as much as anyone, but always thought I had to find ways to be more productive to justify getting raises. So I did things as teach others how to do my job so I could move on to jobs that required more skill. Or came up with better documentation so when something happened, I could find out the reason faster.

Dan

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What you're describing is the capitalist hell that Marx described. Humans in general don't become much more productive with time. Capital equipment does. Thus, all growth accrues to capital, and you wind up with a division between filthy rich and a relatively declining working class, which eventually becomes an *absolutely* declining working class.

This descent was broken with the laws of the Progressive era, and again in the 1930s. It worked until the end of the 1960s.

Progressive taxation is the main tool for fixing this problem, but there are others.

It's some bad cable, but it's a mile long and underground. The question is where is it bad? I called my dad a few minuets ago. The line was perfectly quiet for about 30 seconds, then so noisy I had to hang up. I just picked up the phone and the line is quiet, again. :(

The phone wiring in the house is new. In fact it is less than three feet from the network interface to the only phone jack. I am going to run some 3/4" PVC conduit from the house, to their pedestal. The old wire was pushed under the asphalt driveway, and they don't want to replace it if they can avoid it. They will supply the underground wire to run to the house, if they are sure it is bad. The problem is that when it acts up, I grab my test set and go to the pedestal, and the line is clear again.

I did find this on Ebay. it is a modular to alligator clips and a probe for 66/110 blocks so you can use any modular phone for a test set. It beats one rigged out of a telephone jack, wire and clips

Herds feral cats, then waves them goodbye at the end of the school year. :(

LOL You have just described why "trickle down" economics failed the American middle class.

No, you are right on this one.

I had a problem with a landline once. It started about 6pm every day. Turned out that's when the sun hit the resistor on the side of the building.

Good luck sorting this one out...

Are you talking about the old carbon surge suppresors? They changed them to gas discharge types a long time ago. The supressor was the first thing they changed. They have swapped my sevice to a different pair in that mile long cable, as well as the one to the house, but they did them at the same time. They have never managed to get here when it's acting up.