6 ms·

That case study should come along with case studies like the Superconducting Super Collider [1], where insufficient counting of beans may have led to the demise

• tropo 7y ago
  That one suffered from insufficient members of congress. It needed to be more like the Space Shuttle or F-35. Better locations: 1. It could have been in Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah. 2. It could have been in Maryland, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Virgina. 3. With a slight size increase: Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, and either Illinois or Arkansas 4. With a big size increase: all 5 of Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, Illinois, Arkansas 5. With a big size increase: Kansas, Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Oklahoma 6. With a big size increase: Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, Oklahoma
• i_am_nomad 7y ago
  I came here to say something along these lines. Letting accountants drive engineering is a fatal mistake, but so is engineering without any thought to costs and profits. I’ve walked away from more than one startup whose business plan was, “Let’s design the thing, and only after that will we think about COGS and competitive pricing.” That way lies madness, and Juicero.
  • geophile 7y ago
    Juicero adds another function to the discussion: marketing. Juicero was an example -- a very comical example -- of marketing over everything else: technology and bean counting. Yes, a balance among all three functions is necessary. However, the 737 Max case is definitely about letting bean counters dictate engineering choices: saving design costs by pulling the ancient 737 design off the shelf; the software fixes to the problem introduced by those engines on that frame; and then pretending that the plane was just like an old-school 737, hiding all the complexity and compromises from pilots to avoid recertification costs. And even the decision to charge extra for redundancy of the critical sensor driving the software.
    • PhasmaFelis 7y ago
      Juicero may also have had the opposite problem: the dangers of letting engineers play unsupervised. It appeared to be, and maybe should have been, a cheapjack gizmo swaddled in marketing glitz to justify its ridiculous price. But someone did a teardown and discovered that it actually did contain a very expensive, precision-engineered, completely unnecessary two-ton press. To squeeze fruit pulp out of a tube.
      • mikepurvis 7y ago
        The legendary Juicero teardown: https://blog.bolt.io/juicero/ https://blog.bolt.io/juicero/
        • OnlineGladiator 7y ago
          This one is a lot more fun: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Cp-BGQfpHQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Cp-BGQfpHQ
          • quakeguy 7y ago
            That one was a field day. Hate him, or love AvE, this vid is just fun to watch again. Thx.
          • Tsiklon 7y ago
            AvE's style is very entertaining. I always end up coming away with understanding a little bit more about physical engineering and manufacturing after watching something of his.
      • dsfyu404ed 7y ago
        And all the bits around said overkill press were designed from flat stock with features cut in it to hold things. It was reminiscent of all the terrible "we only know a few manufacturing techniques and the world if full of nails that we will hit with those hammers" type designs that engineering undergrads who have no real world experience crank out. I say that as someone who used to work for the machine shop for a ME program. They probably could have cut the cost by a huge amount by using an aluminum casting (though with more engineering effort they probably could have used plastic but that would have upped the tooling complexity and I dunno if their planned volume would have made that worthwhile) and machining all the features to hold the moving bits into it (bonus points for doing it all with one tool and one holding fixture) and designed their press mechanism around the gearbox of some power tool you can find at Harbor Freight for under $50. New engineers being new engineers I would put serious money on all their machining having stupidly tight tolerances. New engineers love doing that for some reason.
• dwoozle 7y ago
  What are the implications of the Higgs being discovered in 2000?
  • ISL 7y ago
    High-energy particle physics would be more than a decade ahead of where it is now. Moreover, as SSC was planned as a 40 TeV machine, and LHC reaches 14 TeV now (at presumably much higher luminosity), SSC might have discovered something that still has not been observed.
    • jchallis 7y ago
      There is also an excellent chance that the standard model is the story up to 100TeV and these expensive programs take away attention from better science endeavors.
  • papreclip 7y ago
    This super-high energy stuff is generally a boondoggle. You could scale up the energies involved by another 2 orders of magnitude and get precise experimental data describing a new, even more ephemeral state of matter. Any practical benefit to the human race will be collateral damage ("we got better at building magnets and detectors because our toy demanded them")
• dredmorbius 7y ago
  Bad accounting is bad.
• jgon 7y ago
  Right, but in one case hundreds are dead and in the other case we made a physics discovery 15 years later. Not sure if this is the bullet-proof equivalency you think it is.
• scarejunba 7y ago
  We don't know the counterfactual world. Maybe we spend $12 b building it, then we don't run the DARPA AV challenges and the world is behind on CV instead. Maybe that's better, maybe that's worse.