If om and Zaphod can reach rapprochement can peace in Ukraine be far off?!

And related to that is David Foster’s remark “…the key factors were the knowledge possessed by the people, and their experience in working together.”
Which leads to Phillip Sells “… a derivative or ancillary function in that context” such that his knowledge and skills are a “cog” within the organization. But it is this type of diversity, multiple layers of contributors across many areas of knowledge, that is what results in our complex but successful interdependent, cooperative, trust based, society and civilization. The DIE type of diversity is irrelevant to this success, and perhaps even harmful to its achievement.

Not positive, but I suspect the bootstrapping happens by recognizing that additional care, cost, and attention can lead to the next advance. If you needed a 10 tooth gear before, maybe now you need a 50 tooth gear, etc. And you may need to stand on the shoulders of others from the same or a different field. Making a 50 tooth gear may require metal alloy changes for improved strength or toughness or ??? Or improved cutting head materials, etc.

I’ve always wondered how (say) measurement instrument making bootstrapped itself.

Obviously you’ll know what I mean, but for others maybe:

I have best set of vernier calipers in the world. They can resolve down to 0.1mm.

How do I go about manufacturing vernier calipers which can resolve 0.01mm given existing instruments are 10 (or some value of n) times less capable?

With angular measurements, can imagine geometric construction ‘trickery’ would be the angle (sic) of attack. But for measuring distance or thickness? Reducing Pantograph? (which would be Euclidean Trickery again.)

If that little Green Man killed the top 100 people at TSMC who have the many man years accumulated knowledge secret sauce tweaks which allows insanely expensive but well-understood precision machinery from mostly Japanese and European manufacturers to work together to produce economic yields… Then all bets are off. The only glass-half full in that scenario is the knowledge that these processes *can* be made to work. At least by a small number of very smart Taiwanese (this is a bit that GloboHomo MBA Man doesn’t factor in properly, too.. That maybe just maybe it’s not all fungible and it might take a certain culture and temperament and lack of PC to pull it off.) of a certain time and place. Zero evidence to suggest that Empowered Shaniqua can make it happen. That’s worth a lot to an investor. But how many years would it take? I for one do not want to find out.

In a 2010 column, David Brooks said: “In the 19th and 20th centuries we made stuff: corn and steel and trucks. Now, we make protocols: sets of instructions. A software program is a protocol for organizing information. A new drug is a protocol for organizing chemicals. Wal-Mart produces protocols for moving and marketing consumer goods. Even when you are buying a car, you are mostly paying for the knowledge embedded in its design, not the metal and glass.”

This was historically ignorant. The 19th and 20th centuries were also “knowledge economies” (in Karlgaard’s formulation) or “protocol economies” (in the Brooksian terminology). The value of a Boulton & Watt steam engine was not in the “stuff” it was made out of (which could be purchased for a far lower amount than you would pay for the steam engine itself) but rather for the design knowledge contributed by James Watt and the manufacturing process knowledge (protocol knowledge) contributed by Matthew Boulton..and for innumerable additions to that knowledge base by their employees. To take a more recent example, the early 20th century assembly line as implemented by Henry Ford, and the kinds of precise work planning and industrial engineering developed by Taylor and the Gilbreths, certainly represent “protocols” just as much as do Wal-Mart’s supply-chain management procedures.

One could argue that a “protocol” in the form of pure software has no variable cost, unlike a physical product. But in reality, the software is only usable when it is incarnated into a physical device such as a computer. And many of the highest-value forms of software are in fact sold only as an embedded part of a physical device: iPhones, aircraft autopilots, and CNC machine tools, for example. And Wal-Mart obtains financial value from its supply-chain management expertise only when the results of that expertise are sold in the form of “stuff.”

There’s a pod in the Matrix for you until financial modeling and GAAP cum Tax Code Talmuderies decide that there’s not. Then… Poof! You’ll magically disappear in a puff of smoke and fairy dust.

Now… About the Filioque… 😀

I’m thinking about the Virtuals/Physicals distinction and feel that it still does have explanatory value in spite of OBH’s critique here. But this stems, in my case, from a self-consciousness about the fact that I don’t have a lot of serious hands-on practical skills, like those related to building, home and car maintenance (though I could figure out the more basic car stuff if I had to, at least short of the computer control mechanisms), or gardening, etc.

I feel that I exist between the ‘virtual’ and ‘physical’ worlds, in a way. That goes in both my personal and professional lives. I work in pharmaceutical quality control, for example, so while my job supports the making of “stuff,” I’m not actually directly making said “stuff”. I’m fully aware that mine is a derivative or ancillary function in that context – not as ancillary or tangential as, say, HR, but at a remove from hands-on-product in any event. I don’t consider myself, from the economic point of view, fully aligned with either ‘side’ in this. Thus, I wonder if there’s room in the model for people like me. I think that, intuitively, there ought to be.

LOLZ.

“Process knowledge” is a form of IP. Note the second word of that term.

This seems somewhat Duh? 😉

(Not to be demeaning in any regard. I just consider it obvious once you look at it in that form)

Much of the income from the iPhone 4 (there are certainly more recent breakdowns, but I cannot imagine much has changed) is in the form of process knowledge — how to make the thing, not actually making the thing. As I said, it is “Made In China” — and China got about 1.1% of its retail price, for making it.
Source: https://mjperry.blogspot.com/2010/07/iphone-designed-by-apple-in-us.html

The Taiwan fabs are making money for knowing how to make the things, not actually doing it.

The only other aspect of “manufacturing” that you might apply for here would be the notion that a very very specialized factory that is not easy to replicate (again, though, more process knowledge)

Another way to think about it… Modern electronic chips are basically very very very very precisely dirtied SAND.

There is no way the value comes from the SAND. It comes from dirtying it “just precisely so”, i.e., knowing how and where to dirty it.