Neanderpundit

Over here, Mrs D is talking about scaling- as it regards efficiencies.

What I do, for the most part, involves helping people with limited manpower make more widgets with the available manpower.

If you can make 1000 widgets a day with three people and one widget machine, you have to look at the efficiencies.

Can each of those people run two widget machines? three? five? If the machine requires their undivided attention to run efficiently it is time- if possible- to replace the machine. Or automate it. Once the machine is automated, so it requires 0 people to operate, or .05 people to operate it, you can begin to scale. By .05 people, I mean one person can run 20 machines- since they are automated, by merely keeping them fed with raw materials, and removing the finished widgets. Now those three people can make 3 x 20 x 1000= 60,000 widgets a day. need more? Add more machines? Well, if we know that one person can only deal with 20 machines, so we need more people- unless we can automate the process of feeding the raw materials and removing the finished parts. The process of automating deeper and deeper becomes a set of russian dolls, each layer surrounded by another layer, and so on and so forth.

it is important to build reliable automation.
It is important to make sure the equipment can be repaired easily.
It is important to have redundant systems, so up to 20% of your systems can be down and the whole can still operate with some efficiency.

Otherwise, there’s not a lot of limit- in this level- to how far you can scale. The limitations are raw materials and demand.

A classic example of this is fasteners- screws and nails, to the non geeky. At one time machine screws and nails were made one at a time by hand. The process has been scaled- by automation- to a level that would shock people if they knew. I don’t know the actual numbers, off the top of my head, but if you were to order, say, a billion nails, someone in your town could take that order and deliver.

What can’t be scaled is what’s in your head, and the number of hands you have. You can use “office automation” (office layout, more efficient software) to make you better and faster at what you do, but you will always reach a level of efficiency that you cannot exceed, except for a rare burst of creativity- most of which will leave you burned out and feeling ike crap for days afterwards, far less than optimally efficient.

Re-read ‘odd John” by Olaf Stapledon last night. Moderately well written, really, for it’s genre- but it has one of the classic faults of science fiction of it’s time.

That fault- and one that is prevalent in a LOT of SF, is that there is some belief that man will become “civilized”- in other words, man will eventually put away his weapons of war and cease to fight.

This of course is abject bullshit. It’s not quite reason for me to toss the book repeatedly against a wall, but it’s bullshit. Man will always fight. Nothing will ever stop that.