You meant the last statement as a pejorative but you underestimate the incredible amount of engineering and process that goes into a ballpoint pen tip. Toleranc

You meant the last statement as a pejorative but you underestimate the incredible amount of engineering and process that goes into a ballpoint pen tip. Tolerances are on the range of 5 microns and they need to be produced for less than a tenth of a penny each at scale. It requires extremely sophisticated metallurgy and advanced industrial processes to reliably produce such an advanced object and it's a pretty big deal that China's become the 3rd country in the world to start manufacturing pen tips at scale.