Almost certainly not. Touch is really just geared to detecting the presence or absence of vibration. I’d be surprised if you could get a double digit set of waveforms which could be reliably distinguished, let alone the endless combinations that make up normal hearing.

There’s an ~100% chance Helen Keller got asked about this. Uh, yep, although I don’t recognise the source and can’t guarantee it’s not fake or AI slop. The format would be new for slop, at least - the actual fact is in image form, there’s a comment section and it’s dated over a decade ago.

If someone had a copy of her autobiography they could look for the passage to verify, but I don’t.

Vibration receptors can’t distinguish frequencies well enough. Cochlear implants exist, though, and work by directly exciting the auditory nerve.

Thanks, that’s really helpful. I suppose it makes sense that not just material but cut size and bit would matter. They usually focus just on the geometry on YouTube.

Out of curiosity, what’s the lowest you’ve ever gone? It’s hard to picture machining happening at something like 60RPM.

If you want to get that through steam or electric motors or whatever that’s up to you

Since I’m interested in technological bootstrapping more generally, I think most about water wheels, actually! Steam engines need to be machined, which is a chicken-and-egg problem (or I guess crafted freehand to a machining-like precision, like Vaucanson’s lathe). Electric motors don’t necessarily, but they need a source of electricity, and that’s either a lot of batteries or another rotating power source, which again doesn’t solve the problem.

Waterwheels can be made with hand tools - maybe even primitive tools - and can achieve surprisingly modern efficiency and power density. They do require the right topography, but then again they spin indefinitely without needing to be fueled. 50hp is still a sizable wheel, near the top of what existed in pre-modern times, but I’m guessing you can do basic things with an underpowered machine.

Can you give me some typical values, maybe? That would be a big help.

Oh yeah, I have a copy of the Gingery books and I love it.

I haven’t seen Gingery into how much power you need exactly, or what blend of RPM vs. torque is ideal. What would be your guess, since it sounds like you might know?

Can a CNC not do that for just the mechanical parts?

(I know way too much about bootstrapping semiconductor production at small scale, which seems to be viable but highly impractical)

I mean, the idea of socialism has certainly seen setbacks since the end of the last century, hasn’t it? While gross inequality is still a huge problem, and I hope it will be solved somehow, the Lenin/Stalin version of socialism feels like it has basically lost.

A good, quick read if you don’t want to dive into books is the article Why Public Property?

I hadn’t seen this one before, thanks for that. There’s some great examples in here, on the subject of monopolies.

This phenomenon only continues to be proven true over a century later. The United States today has a far greater concentration of industry than it did during Lenin’s analysis. The small business sector has also consistently been on the decline. This is an observable reality. [Accompanied by a graph]

Monopolies and particularly oligopolies are having a moment, but the chart only goes back to the 70’s, and implicitly shows total company number going up (why is hard to say, it’s a paywalled article, and they mixed data from two other sources). If you go back further, I think it would look pretty different - the old gilded age ended, Standard Oil was broken up, and some of the giants of the postwar era got knocked down a peg or more. Further, the trend is pretty uneven by sector. Mom and pop shops are dead now, but independently owned franchises and publicly traded whatevers are hella dominant, and contractors (or “contractors”) are everywhere.

A clear modern example of this would be the smartphone industry. Competition has made cellphone manufacturing more and more complex over time. A cellphone these days is far too complex to be created by a small business. One requires access to enormous factories, machines, and supply chains. According to The Wealth Record, “the net worth of Samsung is pegged at $295 billion.” This is roughly the amount of capital one would need to acquire to even begin to be a serious competitor to Samsung.

I actually know quite a bit about semiconductor manufacturing. It may be the most capital intensive endeavor of all, but you don’t quite need to be Samsung to do it. If you want to build your own at scale, a fab might be “only” a billion dollars. That’s a lot, but many startups have raised it (for other things), so it’s a different story from being Samsung on day 1.

If you just want your chip design made, it’s way easier. TSMC exists to build other people’s designs. Companies like Sam Zeloof’s new enterprise exist for small scale printing of your prototypes. Most of the basic design tools can be found open source.

The network effect has made some genuine monopolies and definitely many oligopolies, but other things are less affected. Individual rich people get rich by chance (if you don’t mind me introducing my own source, which happens to be my favourite one).

All this to say, I don’t think concentration is going to kill capitalism in the near future, or even come close.

It is easy to look backwards at prior systems, such as the feudal economic system or the slave economic system, and then figure out how that system developed into the system afterwards. Adam Smith, for example, already explained in detail in his book Wealth of Nations how capitalism developed out of feudalism long before Marx.

It’s a tangent, so I’ve separated this out, but this is also an interesting claim. The end of feudal economics is an actively researched bit of history, and was far from neat and tidy. IIRC some of those old fealty-type agreements lasted into Marx’s time, if being mere formalities by their end. And I’m not sure why we (correctly) decided slavery was bad after doing it since before recorded history, either.

I just like, don’t believe it. Capitalism is hundreds of years old, and it’s only gotten stronger.

Spontaneous revolution/organisation for revolution has been promised for a long time, and is no closer to happening.