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Boosted by dysfun@treehouse.systems ("gaytabase"):
niconiconi@mk.absturztau.be wrote:
The funny thing about the Military-Industrial Complex is that it can be the most uncapitalist department that almost defies "normal" logic, even as people say they're driven by shareholder interests. The Advanced Inertial Reference Sphere is the best gyroscope ever made, following Draper Laboratory's "mechanical" school of guidance. Only god-tier workers who spent their entire lives making gyroscopes can make them. When low-performance, inferior Ring Laser Gyroscopes from commercial aviation started to compete in military projects for their ultra-low cost, Draper Laboratory wrote this in 1977:
"We are concerned over a trend, a national one, that assumes that manual and mechanical skills are no longer necessary in a world populated by computers, which are impersonal, omniscient, and infallible. A result of this sort of thinking is that the people who are skilled at making things that work are considered expendable... No computer ever made a piece of working hardware. No software ever made a measurement, ground a fitting, sealed a vacuum, cast a bearing, wound a core, heat-treated a metal, magnetized a spoon, polished a lens, or etched a plate.... The letdown in standards has not yet become a problem in this Laboratory; but if the pool of the highly skilled dries up, we would be seriously affected, working as we do in areas where craftsmanship is a principal ingredient."
"Not be wholly out of place in Marxist writing about the labor process." - D. A. MacKenzie, Inventing accuracy: a historical sociology of nuclear missile guidance.
