- 14 Nov 2012 21:32
#14106550
Not entirely true, Kolzene. There are 3-D printers on the commercial market, but they're expensive. Of course, they're first generation (commercially), and still have economies of scale working against their production; still, you don't need to produce everything from one capital city. You can use economies of scale to produce the equipment for local production, and for the basic resources used for production, and then produce everything from a local center using local energy (microgeneration). I expect this would actually be cheaper, since you'd have to collect resources to one center, produce massive amounts of energy there, and then ship the items across the continent, v. the independent source of the resources acting as a distribution center for local production, which would be the central distribution center for the produced goods. Diseconomies of scale also exist, Kolzene.
Kolzene wrote:You're forgetting about economies of scale. Distributing production like this is most often inefficient both energy and other resource-wise, which creates waste, which lowers the overall standard of living. Besides, the technology to be able to produce everything that we can today in the home is pretty far off anyway. Why wait when we can have it all today? "Cheaper" is of no consequence since it will all be "free" (in the monetary sense) anyway, and distance won't matter if things can be easily delivered to you (you'd need to get raw materials one way or the other anyway).
So all this talk about home 3D printing of things, while interesting, really has little if anything to do with Technocracy since it provides so little benefit.
Not entirely true, Kolzene. There are 3-D printers on the commercial market, but they're expensive. Of course, they're first generation (commercially), and still have economies of scale working against their production; still, you don't need to produce everything from one capital city. You can use economies of scale to produce the equipment for local production, and for the basic resources used for production, and then produce everything from a local center using local energy (microgeneration). I expect this would actually be cheaper, since you'd have to collect resources to one center, produce massive amounts of energy there, and then ship the items across the continent, v. the independent source of the resources acting as a distribution center for local production, which would be the central distribution center for the produced goods. Diseconomies of scale also exist, Kolzene.
"We learn to shield ourselves from sleights and veiled abuse with our massive balls. Hope you all have them."- Igor