The parallels with Pearl Harbor are obvious.
]]>Ahh, the jacquard loom.
A nice machine to be sure, but the technology required to build it is simply not in the same league as that required to build and maintain an extruder capable of making actually usable yarn.
A mechanical punchcard driven jacquard loom is made of card, wood, wire and cast iron. It can be kept moving and repaired by a reasonably intelligent someone that knows how to use a hammer and pliers and has the ability to bend fencing wire accurately. Also, it is not a great deal larger than the traditional hand loom in use for centuries and doesn't alter the social dynamic as much as you might think (i am talking about the lifting head here, rather than the automation that allows for automated picking, beating, shedding and take-up.)
The extruder is a different kettle of fish to be sure. It can't be maintained without access to specialist expensive parts built by an advanced first world economy. I'll take as an example the spinneret which is a small, thick, steel cylinder with many small holes drilled in it. These holes are too small too see with the naked eye quite often. Through these you push melted plastic or coagulated gooey viscose. Never mind which, if the process stops, the goo hardens and has to be removed by placing the spinneret in a high temperature baking oven. I'm no expert, but I had the whole process explained to me by the first of many phd students specialising in the extrusion of filament yarn that I've had dealings with and I remember the temperature had 4 figures and the oven was seperated from the furniture of the lab by really thick bricks and a huge abundance of health and safety notices.
So, that's one thing. Each extruder also needs to be able to draw and extend the yarn, precisely to exacting specifications. Also, the melting vat for plastics needs to be precisely controlled in temperature or everything goes wrong. This apparatus needs to take up space as well, and be accessible to human hands, as you need to get in about it to start off new feedstocks and so on
So that's another thing. Also, extruders are BIG. We have a small, single spinneret extruder where I work and it's about 10 ft tall and 15 ft long and 6 ft deep. We have a couple smaller extruders but they can't make more than 50g or so at a time due to the size of their feeders.
So, 2000 of those for one loom. They take up enough space to house a fully integrated spinning plant, capable of carding, drawing and spinning hundreds of kilos of yarn a day. And most likely they won't run fast enough to keep up with a modern rapier loom.
On the other hand, give me a workshop, funding, one year and access to the tools and materials available to any british small holder (fencing wire and a wee forge) and I know, for a fact, that I could build a mechanical jacquard loom. In fact, it's one of my ambitions. It'll take rather longer than a year of course as I have neither funding or time, but it's definitely a project on the level of rebuilding a triumph motorcycle in your garage. Building an extrusion head on the other hand is like, I don't know what, but it's something else altogether.
As someone who teaches weaving and is responsible for the maintenance of 60 handlooms and one machine loom I consider the extruder-loom a fantastic thought experiment. Much like a dyson sphere. As they say, such things can be made, it's merely a question of engineering.
I think the idea of genetically engineered spiders dancing around each other as they spin silk is much more doable than the aforementioned loom. It'd be even more awesome too
]]>Your loom has committed an out of cheese error.
With thanks to Pterry and M$ corporation.
]]>That said, I think you answered the question of why not a spinneret loom quite nicely. Now let's sit back and watch some crazy grad student make a perfectly functional spinneret out of a spinning microvortex of polymer nanoparticles, some well-aimed lasers, and a mucus sprayer on the downstream end to congeal the hot mess into a spun fiber as it gets ejected.
]]>And am now imagining a system using something similar to Fabrican sprayed onto an automated dress form that adjusts to match a body scan, and sprays on clothing in what ever pattern and textures are programmed.
]]>I suspect the people in charge , if they think about such things which is highly unlikely probably figure they can handle the unrest with machines.
In not that many years it really wont be that difficult to rig up more advanced smart drones with various nasties and simply exterminate Dalek style unwanted people with some combination of those nasties and simply shutting off most food and essentials in urban areas.
Another less direct option would be to trade fertility for food, you have to be sterlized and submit to registration or even chipping to get aid.
There is also a more peaceful and I think (assuming civilization survives anyway) probable scenarios , gradual population decline.
Get the birth rate down to subreplacement and it never goes up. If the elite say have 2.1 kids and the proles 1.7 than the problem self corrects. In the end after a few hundred years, a small population of fabulously rich people are all that are left.
The real questions to my mind are
1 Will we have a Greer style catabloic collapse or maybe some kind of ecological collapase first. 2 Will social unrest do to economic decline reach some critical point before technology allows for supression. 3 Is it posible for new social movements to adjust things. I see some small trend to this 19th century stylewith the billionaire give away pledages and a greater emphasis on status through generosity as in some Norse and Native American cultures is a posisble evolutionIts not exactly as if the money addicts will suddenly start caring but many are intensely status conscious and if charity or just having staff imporves status they'll go for it
Also many are quite pragmatic being rich is easier and more possible when you have markets and a customer base. Its rather hard to even get to be wealthy when no one trusts anyone, no one can afford anything and 9/10 the human race is your enemy
]]>Mad Billionaire: "let's kill everyone and use robots to take their shit!"
Sane Billionaire: "hang on, if we do that, who's going to mow our lawns? (And anyway, genocide is naughty.)"
If we can engineer a signifier shift whereby being a humanitarian philanthropists becomes the way billionaires assert their status, then ... well, it couldn't be any worse than the current situation, could it?
The real problem is that billionaires (and their political proxies) are not, in fact, Evil Geniuses (or sane ones, for that matter). They're just confused ordinary folks yanking on levers they don't really understand. Some of them are confused old folks yanking on levers with no heed for the consequences 20 years down the line because they expect to be (a) dead or (b) the world to be running on the same rails they think it's always been on.
The biggest problem with the ideology of capitalism (that is, the drive to implement capitalism everywhere, as opposed to the theory of how capitalism works where it is implemented) is the disproportionate respect it inculcates for successful capitalists ... who in many cases either inherited their wealth or just got lucky once and made best use of their opportunity.
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