If you’re at all mechanically minded, you’re going to start our sort of underwhelmed, since the solution seems pretty transparent: Any determined craftsman could get similar results with a homebrew pantograph and template (hell, you could do it in LEGO).
But keep watching. You’ll get more impressed around the 2-minute mark when you see the mechanism, and more so around 2:40 when you see the cams and realize that the device isn’t tracing letterforms, but rather, in a mechanical sense, understands a series of modular strokes than can be built up in different arrangements to form different letters. Finally, you’ll totally shit yourself at 3:55 because this damned thing—built in the late 1700s—was programmable.
If nothing else of substance, the last couple days of RNC Trump Speech brouhaha have offered a pair of very important business lessons.
(art by DonkeyHotey)
My initial impression was that we were looking at this kind of fantastically gobsmacking paradox:
A candidate renowned for his wealth and business acumen is either unable to afford or incapable of selecting competent help.
But according to this article, that doesn’t seem to be the case.Skilled workers are perfectly happy to hold their noses and accept Trump dollars, but their employer is totally unable to actually use the tools he purchases.
This puts me in the mind of a business aphorism (which I believe I first heard from Ramit Sethi):
Astudents hire A students; B students hire C students.
To mansplain: An A student knows what good work looks like, that good work is hard, and is confident that they can reliably produce good work through the judicious application of hard work.A students want to see good work, and do not want to look like putzes, so they choose subordinates who are as capable as themselves (if not more so).B students may occasionally do good work, but since they don’t know this other stuff (about how to judiciously apply hard work to reliably produce that good work), they can be pretty insecure.They hire down the ladder to shore up their ego.
But, of course, Trump is proving to not even be a B student; the B student is insecure and frustrated because he or she knows what good, consistent work looks like—they just can’t produce it.
Astudents hire A students; B students hire C students.C students hire an A student, a B student, two C students, a guy on Craigslist, their cousin, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Mike Tyson, six doctors, and a personal trainer, follow none of their advice, and then scream at them when they get the C they earned.
Hard to believe it’s just 185 days until a middle-school “Plagiarism” essay entirely copied from Wikipedia is inaugurated President.🇺🇸🔥
These are fun on your computer, and absolutely immersively astounding on your phone/tablet. The future is here, but unevenly distributed—with some portions dune-buggying around Mars, picking at rocks and wrecking up the joint.
Consider this your daily reminder that, in contrast to how things were when I was a kid, Mars is now populated—and it’s ruled by robots!
