2018-05-14

Planning & Strategy.

• Horace Dediu on the impact that the iMac had on Apple.
• Made in Space won a Phase 2 SBIR project for a multimaterial + hybrid printer called "Vulcan."
• Bunnie Huang is making an open video development board in order to more effectively challenge the DMCA's Section 1201.

Making & Manufacturing.

• A pretty descriptive (in spite of its production values) video of Spirit Aerosystems making a 787 forward fuselage.
• Wikipedia's list of manufacturing processes. As Ryan noted on twitter, with geographic network effects + the crazy range of ways that humans have figured out how to make stuff, it just seems a little unlikely that all of these would be performed everywhere in the world with equal quality and cost. Related, I'm still taking responses to my "will we ship proportionally more or less stuff in 10 years" question, and will share some of your responses next week!
• On traditional automakers' (i.e. not Tesla) efforts to bring collaborative automation into factories.

Maintenance, Repair & Operations.

• The National Council of Occupational Safety and Health, a nonprofit which advocates for good working conditions, released its 2018 "Dirty Dozen" report on manufacturers who put employees at risk. The big names on the list are Amazon and Tesla.

Distribution & Logistics.

• UPS and the Teamsters union are negotiating one of the largest collective bargaining deals in the US, covering 280k employees. Essentially, UPS wants multiple tiers of drivers, allowing for 7 day service without double time pay on the weekends.
• Boeing expects the air freight market to grow, and is increasing production of 767s (from 2.5 per month to 3 per month) in 2020.
• A review of Rachel Slade's new book, Into the Raging Sea, which chronicles the 2015 sinking of El Faro. "Unlike the authors of The Perfect Storm and other books about marine catastrophes, Slade did not have to resort to reasonable inference and guesswork about the vessel’s final moments. She was able to quote the actual words spoken on the bridge. The mundane remarks about the fetching of coffee, the complaints about the company, the jokes, the giving and taking of routine orders and the wistful asides about home, children and spouses left behind — these details paint a poignant and tragic picture of ordinary people heading to their deaths."

Inspection, Testing & Analysis.

• I want to learn more about the California (especially SF) housing situation: A few descriptive stats on what's going on now, how we got here, what the outlook is. Know something, or got a link? Holler!
• Recommended: Josh tears down one of those Japanese waving cats (maneki-neko, or "beckoning cat"), and does a really excellent job explaining how it works and why that's interesting.
• As cities get larger, people walk faster.

Tangents.

• Public media companies buying podcast distribution apps. "Pocket Casts, widely considered to be one of the best mobile apps for podcast listening, has been acquired by a collective group that includes NPR, WNYC Studios, WBEZ Chicago, and This American Life."
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The US expended 23.24 quadrillion BTU in electricity conversion losses in 2017. From the US Energy Information Administration's Monthly Energy Review.