[ExI] i have seen the future: was RE: french and english are messed up, was: RE: test

[spike]

>>...I think Spike was actually being advanced...
Brian
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>...Brian you are too kind, sir.  

>...I have seen the future, but I am going to wait until tomorrow to write
about it.  I am nearly falling asleep at the keyboard.

spike


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I was walking near my house along Coyote Creek where there was a farm until
recently.  They were building an enormous tilt-up, dimensions about 100
meters by about 150 meters, height about 15 meters.  I noticed they were
cast wall with no windows and few doors and wondered why they would need
such an enormous enclosed volume.  Then it occurred to me what I think they
are building there.

Those of us who live in the burbs have seen the rise of Amazon Prime same
day delivery.  They hire Uber drivers and such.  Sometimes you can buy stuff
and have it there within two or three hours.  It occurred to me as I looked
at these buildings that they are warehouses for either Amazon or someone who
has the same idea: have it to where all manner of merchandise is on the
15-meter-height multi-level shelves, you order it, robot plucks it down,
puts it in a self-driving car, motors it out to your house within an hour,
faster than you can get in your own Detroit and go find the item at a big
box store.

This will shut down traditional retailing.  Evidence: imagine yourself
running a retailing business.  Estimate the cost of employees alone for a
first cut, and make the front door your control surface, kinda like we
engineers think of a plenum chamber with everything going thru a single
valve.  Your total gross income is the sticker price on every item that goes
that door, your net sales the markup on those items going out.  OK to
estimate net profit, you need to subtract your employee cost, ja?

OK good, now we can estimate that by counting the employees we see in there
and estimating they get about what, 15 bucks an hour?  NO.  Because all you
see are the young and pretties when you go in a store.  They are the ones
you want out front encouraging sales and attracting people who are attracted
to the young and pretties.  We old and uglies work in the back, stocking,
ordering, managing, accounting, engineering, yakkity yakking and bla
bla-ing, and we generally make more than those up front, but even the young
and pretties cost you way more than 15 bucks an hour because of all the
costs associated with keeping them comfortable and happy.  A pretty good
estimate of employee cost is triple their hourly (for a first cut estimate.)

Now compare to that markup times the flux of merchandise leaving your
control surface, your d(merchandise)/dt, and realize if you don't see a
steady ant-line march of cheapy Chinese manufactured goods streaming out
your front door, you are on your way out of business.  Ja?

OK now, consider the alternative.

Enormous warehouses filled floor to high ceiling with shelves stocked with
cheapy Chinese manufactured goods, being continually stocked by 18-wheelers
driving themselves, robots unloading and stocking shelves, fetching down
goods as they are ordered, loading into self-driving cars, few employees
(none of whom need to be young and pretty) involved in the process at all.

The reason this all occurred to me is the location of this warehouse
project.  Goods can flow out of there 24/7 without ever touching a freeway.
It is close to the intersection of California's State Road 237 and
Interstates 680 and 880 (the development is called McCarthy Ranch.)  They
could deliver goods to half a million consumers all while staying
exclusively on surface streets, which means speeds could be restricted to 10
meters per second, so you have a stopping distance of about 6 meters in less
than a second on clean pavement, and the controls engineering is simple for
those speeds.  Your delivery carts could use simple mass-produced lead acid
batteries, for their advantages for that purpose are notable and their
disadvantages tolerable: great for initial cost, for high duty cycle and
life, for safety and reliability, for fast recharge rates.  The
disadvantages: heavy (doesn't matter much if you have regenerative braking
and low acceleration) short range (everything would be shorty 50 km round
trips maximum, half hour charge cycle, ready to roll again) factories
already in place for mass production, mature technology.

I think we are seeing the future of retailing under construction at McCarthy
Ranch in San Jose.

spike