Comments on: Industrial By-Products of the Gun Trade

By: Thibodeaux

Thibodeaux — Wed, 03 Dec 2014 17:56:02 +0000

Indeed, Alrenous, I made that very argument on Moldbug’s site, when he proposed crypto-locked weapons as the foundation of a secure state. Made me suspect that, as a born-and-bred Brahmin, he’d never seen a firearm up close in real life.

By: Alrenous

Alrenous — Wed, 03 Dec 2014 12:15:12 +0000

The only concrete argument against crypto-locks I’ve found depends on guns being basement blacksmith level technology.

I take the moral that it’s a bad idea to trust untrained gut reactions.

By: David Foster

David Foster — Sun, 30 Nov 2014 14:29:31 +0000

In the light of today’s panic about robots-will-take-our-jobs, it is worthwhile noting that the roboticization of machine tools has been going on for a long, long time. The excerpt mentions Blanchard’s copying lathe and Spencer’s “brain wheel” cam. Numerical control of machine tools via instructions on paper tape was pretty common by the 1970s.

By: Alien

Alien — Sun, 30 Nov 2014 10:09:25 +0000

Forgetteth not that much of this industrial progress came on the shoulders of Mr. Whitney, who demonstrated the value of interchangeable parts in quantity with his U.S. government contract for rifles.

More impressive still when considered that Whitney had to make the tooling that made the production tooling.