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Comment by rvnx | Hacker News Reader

5 USD of material, millions of USD spent to train, hire, motivate and retain the engineers who are finding such solutions.

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Ford, whose electrical engineers couldn’t solve some problems they were having with a gigantic generator, called Steinmetz in to the plant. Upon arriving, Steinmetz rejected all assistance and asked only for a notebook, pencil and cot. According to Scott, Steinmetz listened to the generator and scribbled computations on the notepad for two straight days and nights. On the second night, he asked for a ladder, climbed up the generator and made a chalk mark on its side. Then he told Ford’s skeptical engineers to remove a plate at the mark and replace sixteen windings from the field coil. They did, and the generator performed to perfection.

Henry Ford was thrilled until he got an invoice from General Electric in the amount of $10,000. Ford acknowledged Steinmetz’s success but balked at the figure. He asked for an itemized bill.

Steinmetz, Scott wrote, responded personally to Ford’s request with the following:

Making chalk mark on generator $1.

Knowing where to make mark $9,999.

Ford paid the bill.

I guess great minds think alike but fools rarely differ. I posted a link to the story you copied just below you, lol.

This also goes a long way to explaining why service economies are richer than goods-based ones; and why "manufacturing jobs" as a political project are mostly populist nonesense.

A lot of intelligence goes into manufacturing and a lot of innovation comes out of it. The overemphasis on financial engineering causes substantial market distortions and in my view is the principal driver of our increasingly dysfunctional economies. I.e. you don’t need to be a populist to care about manufacturing jobs

As a solution to class mobility, you do. And as a route to increases in high-paying low-skill labour.

My comment about "service jobs" is kinda evidenced with your own remark: the existence of high-value manufacturing jobs. The high-value here is always in the cognitive dimension, rather than the physical.

My assertion that more intelligence is required than commonly thought scales all the way down to the low value manufacturing. I’m often quite surprised at the ingenuity and skill that goes into low value manufacturing. In addition a substantial low value manufacturing base reduces the incremental cost of resources and tooling required by the high value manufacturing increasing the viability. Effectively setting up a cross subsidy.

Sure, but the political project is supposed to provide such jobs to people who are otherwise not very skilled.

My point being that the relevant political project for increasing class mobility, prosperity etc. is skills/education/training/etc. rather than this false-belief that there is something called "Manufacturing" which pays well without such things.

Or, to use the example given, it's "knowing where to put the chalk", rather than removing the metal plate. There is no modern rich economy which can sell "removing metal" as the route to prosperity.

That used to be the case, but all that labour has been automated away or is otherwise not well-paying,.

Now it is all about value-add via skills.

My concern is ‘modern rich economies’ are a temporary aberration due to financialization and that the intelligence vs work schism will fall apart due to the under-appreciation of the importance of maintaining a manufacturing base. I would agree with you if the windfall of having been intelligent was invested in becoming more intelligent and thus an advantage is maintained but by my observation that has not occurred. It seems people will instead use their relative luxury to hold increasingly illogical ideas. Not only will we not have a manufacturing base but we won’t be intelligent either. For now financialization is propping up our way of life but that won’t last forever.

Interesting view, imo, probably wrong.

We imagine the "value-add" due to advanced cognitive skill is somehow "less real" than that which could be replaced with a machine arm.

What we have discovered, and will do so, is that knowing where to place the chalk was always the basis of profit.

At no point did I suggest cognitive work was less real.

And what point is knowing where to place the chalk if there is no machine upon which to place it. Proximity is important. Then there is the matter of scale and a question of how many pure knowledge experts are really needed.

I think one point worth appreciating (apart from the political reasons to drive manufacturing jobs) is that manufacturing provides jobs where people who are uneducated/low-skilled but intelligent can make significant contributions.

Putting a fan next to a conveyor to filter out empty boxes doesn't require a college degree (if anything a college degree makes it more difficult to find that solution), but it is nonetheless a significant process improvement.

Picasso was at a Paris market when an admirer approached and asked if he could do a quick sketch on a paper napkin for her. Picasso politely agreed, promptly created a drawing, and handed back the napkin but not before asking for a million Francs.

The lady was shocked: “How can you ask for so much? It took you five minutes to draw this!”

“No”, Picasso replied, “It took me 40 years to draw this in five minutes.

Great story but I had no idea who he was. Found on Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Proteus_Steinmetz

There is a great series on YouTube:

https://m.youtube.com/@KathyLovesPhysics/videos

Really took Tesla down a peg. (No, Tesla did not invent the 3-phase power system we use today. That was a Russian in Switzerland, Dolivo-Dobrovolsky.)

Like Charles Proteus who sent Henry Ford a bill for $10,000 for drawing a circle on a generator with chalk, it was $1 to draw the circle and $9,999 to know where to draw it.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/charles-proteus-stein...

Exactly like old joke:

There was a problem with machine on factory floor, company tried to do everything already so they called specialist. To cut story short, specialist went around the machine took hammer out and smashed in one place - machine fixed. Invoice for the company $500 - so manager was angry

- "one swing of hammer $500?" - "swing of hammer was free, knowing where to hit $500"

It's no joke, dude. That was Charles Proteus Steinmetz.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/charles-proteus-stein...

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