[ExI] plastic turkeys

William Flynn Wallace foozler83 at gmail.com
Thu Nov 19 21:18:35 UTC 2020


plastics - whoever invents biodegradable ones will be superrich - ditto the
person who invents a spray we can use on the floating islands of plastic
flotsam and jetsam in the Pacific for them to degrade harmlessly -ditto for
degradable styrofoam.  bill w

On Thu, Nov 19, 2020 at 3:10 PM spike jones via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

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> *From:* spike at rainier66.com <spike at rainier66.com>
> *…*
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> >…Where I was going with that thought experiment: go one level up.  The
> guy right upstream of the packaging guy is the one who runs the injection
> molding machine.  She is given the mold pieces, usually two for this kind
> of end product, and mounts them into the device, sets every dial, and hits
> start.  spike
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> OK go one level up again.  Someone had to make the mold pieces to give to
> the technician to mount in the injection molding machine.  That to me is
> the best job of all, because it is a fun interesting inventor’s job.  That
> person must decide what kind of mold would be the right thing and how to
> design it.
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> Whenever I see something like a plastic turkey being used to sell gas
> grills, I look closely at that plastic device and learn much every time I
> examine one.  I don’t see a replica of a turkey, I see a piece of marketing
> equipment that must be manufactured in moderately low quantities (perhaps
> 10 thousand units (because every household doesn’t want a plastic turkey))
> and wonder about the manufacturing process to bring it into existence.
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> For instance…
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> In 1962, Dustin Hoffman’s character in The Graduate was given the advice
> to go into plastics.  He didn’t want to, thought that would be so boring.
> It isn’t!  That isn’t boring at all.  If he took one day or even one hour
> to look into plastics, he woulda had a great career rather than wasting his
> talent making movies.  OK so I like Dustin Hoffman’s work so he is a
> special case, but still.
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> For instance… you have examples of stuff all over your house made of
> thermal-setting plastic, nearly all of them acrylonitrile butadiene styrene
> (ABS) or some chemical close cousin of ABS:
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> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acrylonitrile_butadiene_styrene
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> which include things like milk jugs and shampoo bottles and that kind of
> stuff, low cost, easy to make in quantity, durable, etc.  Since I named
> those two ABS examples, pls go examine them right now and tell me what you
> see.  Did you notice the seam?  Both of those and anything made of ABS or
> any injection-molded plastic will always have those seams, and most of the
> time they are easy to find.
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> OK then, what about that seam?  And what about the two pieces on either
> side of that seam please?  What did you notice about the seam itself and
> the two pieces?  What does that tell you about how that item was designed?
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> spike
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