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When I was in college the science building had a machine shop. Old-time professors remembered when the department hired technicians to build experiments. Studen

When I was in college the science building had a machine shop. Old-time professors remembered when the department hired technicians to build experiments. Students would build crazy things there for classes, like 2 meter high tesla coils. After I graduated they built a new science building for $X00M. It was very eco-friendly, had its own cafe, lots of natural lighting, lots of nooks for small groups of students to gather and study ... but no machine shop. (Although since then they have added a 3D printer service.) But when you look at places with high rates of innovation like Shenzhen or SV, one of their strengths is that the people with knowledge of techniques are nearby to readily avaiable facilities for production. I wonder how much production knowledge has been lost from the West (c.f. the rust belt), and how much that will cost us in the long term.

alangibson 4y ago
They could a very safe enclosed CNC milling machine and lathe for a few hundred grand. No one wants to have grubby machinery around anymore though. That's for offshoring.
shreyshnaccount 4y ago
As long as these bean counting MBA bloody management pigs get to decide where our money goes, we will all end up doing absolutely nothing of value. When I was in HS, we had one of those MBA principals incharge for a while, and it was absolute hell-couldn't do anything at all of value, lest it be an unforgivable sin. and then we had a technical principal who didn't care about the BS, and we were able to do some amazing projects, get funding for whatever crazy idea we could elaborate on and ended up ranking really good nationally in a few competitions.
jrpt 4y ago
Seems like someone forgot to tell the designers they needed a machine shop. Stanford's physics building has a machine shop. I did an undergraduate in physics at Stanford and used it once or twice. They have full time machinists working there too.

alangibson 4y ago

They could a very safe enclosed CNC milling machine and lathe for a few hundred grand. No one wants to have grubby machinery around anymore though. That's for offshoring.

shreyshnaccount 4y ago

As long as these bean counting MBA bloody management pigs get to decide where our money goes, we will all end up doing absolutely nothing of value. When I was in HS, we had one of those MBA principals incharge for a while, and it was absolute hell-couldn't do anything at all of value, lest it be an unforgivable sin. and then we had a technical principal who didn't care about the BS, and we were able to do some amazing projects, get funding for whatever crazy idea we could elaborate on and ended up ranking really good nationally in a few competitions.

jrpt 4y ago

Seems like someone forgot to tell the designers they needed a machine shop. Stanford's physics building has a machine shop. I did an undergraduate in physics at Stanford and used it once or twice. They have full time machinists working there too.