Brexit, The Economy and House Prices (Part 2)

Rusty_Shackleton

GreatApe wrote: »

Call them mini factories, or better yet call them mini unspecilised general very limited factories and you then have an idea of what they will be used for

You have very little understanding what they are used for, or more specifically, in manufacturing businesses, what they could be used for. You demonstrated that when you started talking about kettles.

I work in manufacturing that uses thousands of different metal and plastic parts. We spend millions on precision engineered (that's CNC milling) parts (we assemble, we don't manufacture the parts themselves) and have a workshop with 3 and 5 axis milling machines for our own prototyping and small batch work. You should really trust me when I say there are serious possibilities for manufacturing when 3D printers become more accurate, can use more materials, and come down in cost.

Anyone else from a manufacturing background that deals with plastic/metal parts care to chime in with some expertise?

Rusty_Shackleton

GreatApe wrote: »

I used to be a process engineer

You know, those people that design production lines and processes

What sort of process engineer/what sector? Because I can't believe for a second you wouldn't see the very obvious potential for 3D printers in manufacturing.

Sure, if you produce a million identical kettles a year, casts will always be cheaper. But anything where customisation is required, or where you use a lot of parts but in small quantities, 3D printers quickly become viable (with improvements to the technology, it is still in its infancy)

Rusty_Shackleton

Sapphire wrote: »

Even a fool could see that the EU is nothing like the United States – and never will be. :rotfl::rotfl::rotfl:

cogito wrote: »

It doesn't work like that. The USA is federal and the richest states support the poorest.

Funny that, sounds an awful lot like the EU. Maybe you could tell Sapphire?

cogito

Rusty_Shackleton wrote: »

It's not at the moment, but as lots of brexiters like to point out, it's headed towards a United States of Europe.

Way to ignore the actual point we were discussing though, that the EU is a federation of states like the US.

Don't be silly. A fereration of states and a federal state are two entirely different things.

Jean Monnet says so. You may have heard of him.

http://www.jeanmonnetprogram.org/archive/papers/00/00f0301EN-02.html

GreatApe

Rusty_Shackleton wrote: »

What sort of process engineer/what sector? Because I can't believe for a second you wouldn't see the very obvious potential for 3D printers in manufacturing.

Sure, if you produce a million identical kettles a year, casts will always be cheaper. But anything where customisation is required, or where you use a lot of parts but in small quantities, 3D printers quickly become viable (with improvements to the technology, it is still in its infancy)

I used to work in the steel industry and also a transformer manufacturing business.

Anyway list all the manufactured products the country buys in order of volume (by value) and see if '3D printers' will do anything.

Let me get it started

Food: Yes food is a huge manufacturing activity the largest one in fact. Im not talking about farming or growing food but processing it. Everything from your cornflakes to your loaf of bread to your can of coke to your ready meals goes through a 'factory'. '3D printers' will not play a part there

Cars about £40 billion a year. Are we going to be printing cars in our kitchen, no

Those two actually cover the majority of manufacturing in an advanced economy.

cogito

Rusty_Shackleton wrote: »

Oh god, you're right. How could I have been so stupid not to see that the EU is nothing like a federal system such as the US.

I mean, it's not like California has 53 representatives, Texas 36, Florida 27... It couldn't be that representatives are apportioned by population of states and that it's reviewed after each census, could it?!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_congressional_apportionment

The confusion is yours. Legislation propsed by the House of Representatives must be approved by the Senate which has two members per state.

And, yes, you could have been so stupid.

GreatApe

Rusty_Shackleton wrote: »

Sure, if you produce a million identical kettles a year, casts will always be cheaper. But anything where customisation is required, or where you use a lot of parts but in small quantities, 3D printers quickly become viable (with improvements to the technology, it is still in its infancy)

I did not say '3D printers' have no use whatsoever

I am saying they wont replace traditional manufacturing.
I doubt even 1% of traditional manufacturing will be displaced by '3D printers' even in 50 years time

buglawton

mayonnaise wrote: »

Is it really necessary to post the same info over and over?
I realise you guys are desperate for any morsel of positive economic news, but come on...

About 20 pages apart... but thanks anyway for re-quoting both items.

Rusty_Shackleton

cogito wrote: »

The confusion is yours. Legislation propsed by the House of Representatives must be approved by the Senate which has two members per state.

And, yes, you could have been so stupid.

The EU has MEPs allocated proportionate to population (like US representatives), and the European Council has the heads of state (1 per) for each member (like US senators). There's really a lot of overlap in how they work in principle. A lot of the differences are down to the fact the EU is moving towards a US like system, but not quite there yet.

Rusty_Shackleton

GreatApe wrote: »

I did not say '3D printers' have no use whatsoever

I am saying they wont replace traditional manufacturing.
I doubt even 1% of traditional manufacturing will be displaced by '3D printers' even in 50 years time

I completely agree, they'll never replace most manufacturing of food, or whole cars, but a lot of manufacturing is actually assembly work (e.g. cars). The actual production of the parts on the other hand, including for cars, are areas ripe for additive manufacturing. Once 3D printers are fast and accurate enough, why would I waste money machining billets down when I can use additive and save a lot of material - CNC milling machines are expensive capital equipment and use a lot of power, so they don't have anything over 3D printers in that regard.

Anything with sufficient volume to have casts is safe, granted. I think our differing opinions are due to scale - not got any knowledge of transformers, but I imagine not much in the way of precision parts and relatively few individual parts compared to say, a car? As I said, my employer uses thousands of parts, a lot of which are in fairly low volumes. We do a little bit with extruded materials and casts, but the majority of our parts are precision engineered or fabricated, so I can see a lot of benefit.