2022-01-03

Notes, 2022-01-03.

In May I joined Spencer as staff at The Prepared, effectively doubling its headcount overnight. But this newsletter is built by so many people: the 15 guest writers who graced your inbox in 2021, the hundred of Members who join us every day on Slack, our sponsors, and of course, dear reader, you.

It was a year shaped by unexpected demand and logistical lags up until the very end. But I weathered it a lot better thanks to this community of practice, thinking through the world of atoms while hanging out in the world of bits. These final thoughts on the year have been informed on all levels by The Prepared community writ large. Thanks for being a part of it.

-Hillary Predko

The most clicked link from last week's issue (~11% of opens) was a video explaining JWST's goals that Spencer and his daughter watched many, many, many times over.

Planning & Strategy.

Over the past six months I’ve edited three of our reading group author chats. The transcripts regularly run over 10,000 words (too long to run in the newsletter), so I fastidiously cut them down by 80%. The most challenging aspect of this is carrying the narrative through the piece; these conversations are led largely by the interests of the Members in the Zoom meeting, and they often meander in ways that are simultaneously delightful and a bit hard to follow when you strip out all the gesticulating and nodding that Zoom has trained us to do over the past two years. The Cameron Blevins interview as we ran it is about the tension between public and private ownership, but could have just as easily been about archival research and how data shapes our understanding of history; the Michael Malone interview as we ran it is about the rise of Apple, but we also talked extensively about how technology journalism has shifted over the past 40 years. In our interview with Kate Darling, I focused on animal/robot analogies, and discussions about automation and work didn’t make the final cut. Here’s an interesting quote about legislating responsibility with human/robot teams:

There is a danger in how legal responsibility depends on our biases. Recently, there was an Uber accident with a semi-autonomous vehicle - there was a driver who was supposed to be paying attention but a pedestrian was killed. All of the blame fell on the driver, which is what the automobile companies want. But when you have humans and robots making a mistake together, we need to be really careful about not falling into this automation bias where we trust the automation and blame humans. I think the problem is not merely the simplification of responsibility, but that we will simplify it in the wrong way.

• I love science fiction, and was delighted when Anna and Kelly included Ursula Le Guin’s Brief Rant on Technology in their recent issue: “Our human-built surroundings are an accretion of once-advanced technologies. Each new development bakes in a new set of affordances, habits, and ways of being in the world.” Le Guin’s The Dispossessed is my favorite novel; it presents an anarchist world where everything from language to material culture is shaped by the absence of private property, which becomes foundational to a divergent technological paradigm. I wouldn’t want to live there - the society is anti-science and run by a spooky shadow bureaucracy - but the thought experiment reinforces the fact that emerging technologies don’t have a predetermined outcome and resistance is not futile. See also Kane’s reminder that the formless metaverse has a specific history in dystopian science fiction.

Making & Manufacturing.

• I want to take a moment to celebrate Christopher Payne, the photographer behind many of the incredible factory photo essays we’ve run this year. His portfolio is incredible, and captures both the dizzying scale of modern manufacturing and the craftsmanship of skilled workers.
• I didn’t make much physical stuff this year, so instead I’ve lived vicariously through the project updates posted in the Members’ Slack. I particularly enjoyed seeing Michael Dales prototype the joinery for a sintered nylon and wood guitar. Thanks also to Michael for introducing the lunch crew to the term fettle: “to prepare or arrange (a thing, oneself, etc), especially to put a finishing touch to.”

Maintenance, Repair & Operations.

• I’ve been trying to pay more attention to the work of rebuilding infrastructure after disasters. I was shaken by the drone footage of BC’s washed out Coquihalla Highway, and it was heartening to see the highway reopen within a month thanks to the tireless work of maintenance crews and engineers. I’ve also learned that after communities are decimated by disaster, the rebuilding and repair work is often carried out by migrant workers who face labor abuses and abysmal working conditions. The slow and comparatively quiet work of rebuilding follows in the wake of dramatic calamities, but with increasingly extreme weather, resilience work is a multi-billion dollar industry with workers who need protection and industry-wide standards.
• The price of lumber has dropped back down from its peak in May (over $1600 per 1000 board feet, up from $400 per 1000 board feet in January 2020) when Brian wrote a comprehensive breakdown of the market. The effect of the February 2021 Texas Ice Storm on prices surprised me most:

Because the storm occurred with very little warning, many factories weren’t able to shut down properly, resulting in polymers congealing and solidifying in the equipment. In many cases significant repairs were required before production could be brought back online, and as of mid-March only 60% of production had been restored.

In addition to drywall joint compound, PVC pipe, and dozens of other building products, polymers and resins are key components for the glues in manufactured wood products such as plywood, OSB, and gluelams.

• There were some exciting wins for the consumer right to repair movement, including Apple announcing self-service repair, the release of the modular, highly repairable Framework laptop, and Patagonia partnering with iFixit on a care and repair guide.
• At the start of 2021, I had never heard of Mohammed Nuru, SF’s former director of public works. In 2021-09-06, Ruth expressed her frustration with SF’s barely functional self-cleaning toilets, “a more expensive and less functional descendant of the pissoir, which kept drunk men from dirtying the streets in 1800s France.” Soon after, a reader tipped me off to another costly public works project in San Francisco, this time a redesign of the municipal garbage cans that was estimated to run between $6 and $16 million. And in 2021-11-22, Divya covered Recology’s no-bid contract for SF’s trash - and the unwarranted rate increases they tried to pass on to residents. These incidents are all related to the corrupt dealings of Nuru - characterized by the court as a “sweeping scheme to defraud the San Francisco public of its right to his honest services.” The three stories we covered are a small fraction of what he’s pled guilty to; the FBI is continuing to investigate corruption in the city government, and it’s outrageous that in a city with the highest income inequality in California, millions of tax dollars have been allocated so poorly.

Distribution & Logistics.

• Supply chain chaos cascaded across the world in 2021 as regular operations became unpredictable. From Matthew Hockenberry: “Almost every supply chain problem can be traced to a failure in prediction. But usually these are isolated, by geography, by sector, and they have (historically) tended to be relatively short-lived.” The utter uncertainty of the pandemic has contributed to a collective failure in prediction that transcends discrete industries and has exposed how fragile just-in-time and lean manufacturing are to disruption. Or, as Ryan Petersen, the CEO of Flexport put it, “We stripped the shock absorbers out of the economy in pursuit of better short term metrics.” Whether this leads to reshoring manufacturing, a move toward increased inventory levels, or a tenuous return to pre-2020 manufacturing that remains vulnerable to the next crisis stands to be seen. For now, here’s a recap of a the main contributors to the current quagmire:
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  Chips have been in short supply, and the most apparent outcome has been the increased price of new and used vehicles as fewer cars come off assembly lines. The chip shortage is in some ways more of an allocation problem than a supply shortage - many automakers canceled semiconductor orders when COVID hit, anticipating lower car sales. When demand actually rose, semiconductor capacity had been allocated to other companies, leaving automakers with long lead times for parts. Industry consolidation leaves buyers with few companies to choose from, and the increased demand drives up the cost of available chips. This has been a boon for small fab houses, and may lead to a rise in US domestic production. For a fascinating case study on how the chip shortage affects small scale hardware production, see Bunnie Huang’s recent blog post.
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  Everything about freight has been thrown out of equilibrium. Transport times from Chinese factories to US ports rose by 40-50%, and costs rose 4-5x. The port of Long Beach in California had frequently had dozens of container ships queuing to unload, leading to an executive order for around the clock port operations. Today shipping companies use massive ships that can only dock at upgraded ports, meaning those boats can’t just cruise on over to Oakland. These ships are also vulnerable to the bank effect and well, getting lodged in narrow canals.
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  Talking about logistics is an abstract way of talking about the labor of people who make things and moving them from point A to point B. 2021 was a year of labor shortages influenced by pandemic lockdowns, people leaving their jobs, strikes for better working conditions (congratulations to Kelloggs and John Deere workers for successful actions!), independent contractors refusing work that doesn’t pay well enough, and the staggering fact that over five million people have already lost their lives from COVID.
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  Finally, global supply chains are massively complex, meaning no one intervention can right the ship. As Tim Maughan wrote, “the global economy is a gigantic sprawling mess, its interlocking mechanisms and networks so complex that its whole has become impossible for human intelligence to comprehend.” This is, however, by design. Modern supply chain management assumes that supply networks are unknowable. In the name of efficiency, all aspects of supply chains must be modular, and as Marian Posner explains, “information about provenance, labor conditions, and environmental impact is unwieldy when the goal of your system is simply to procure and assemble goods quickly.” We’re left navigating the tributaries of a flood of goods, pouring out in all directions, unknowable even to the people who set it in motion.

Inspection, Testing & Analysis.

• There are a lot of standards - ISO alone has published more than 22,700. Pulled out of context, individual standards can provide a fascinating window into niche jobs and industries. Last year we covered some of the weirder Standard Reference Materials (whale blubber, freeze dried urine and domestic sludge), standards and specialized tools for measuring how slippery floors are, and ISO 3533 (the new standard for sex toys). My personal favorite is this rather friendly looking floor tapping machine, used to test building sound transmission.

Tangents.

• My most memorable chuckles this year were probably from this TikTok video of sandwiches being prepared on a jobsite, or possibly from this vending machine that sells - and then immediately breaks - ceramic plates. If you need a lift, remember the crane lifting a crane lifting a crane, lifting a crane which is also lifting a crane.
• I didn’t put a single reference to This Place is Not a Place of Honor in our feature on nuclear waste vitrification. At the time I was proud of my restraint, but in retrospect I really regret it. They’re the best memes.

Pour one out for the Ever Given.