Queensland exports about 25% of timber production, but changes are now in progress to ensure local housing demands are met, as the current material costs are exobitant:
You are only repeating the arguments of run-of-the-mill management, and most people reading Kelley's blog post will be familiar with them.
There's something else going on here.
After all, as a business manager with a duty to make the most for your shareholders, if you really anticipated scaling your compute needs, wouldn't you invest in the cheapest way to do more computing ?
If you were a board member of a trucking company, and your CEO told you "Managing trucks is a pain, always filling them with fuel and stuff, I outsourced it to another trucking company, they are only charging us 5 times our previous budget in equipment and drivers salaries. Now we can focus on what we do best, making our customers happy" you'd fire that CEO.
"It's easier to hire for cloud skills that bare metal skills" is self-fulling in part, but if you are doing self-hosting correctly, it's also meaningless because you will just run largely the same software infrastructure. You can go to Dell or HP and have them deliver you a rack or more that already have the cloud software you want installed.
The "it frees up organizational focus for your customer's problem" is the closest to being meaningful. Modern corporate management seems weak generally, other examples include the trend of not promoting internally and instead hiring from outside -- it's like the none of the corporations trust themselves to evaluate people themselves, and inherently feel more confident hiring someone another corporation has found valuable.
"We are bad at managing our core business which has a profit margin of 10%. Therefore, we will take an essential service in support of that, outsource it to a company which is known for algorithmically detecting customer lock-in and raising prices, and is extremely difficult to leave, and will charge us 5 times as much."
My gut feeling is that is what is going on. But, the creation of new plasma donation centers is not a random process, so we've identified a correlation, not a definitive cause and effect. What if areas that are on an upward economic trajectory are more likely to have new businesses open ? Maybe those are the areas where it is easier to get the necessary zoning or building permits.
There was a thread here recently about OCR4All ( I haven't used any of these tools recently, but I'm keeping track because I might be doing that soon ).
I have followed various open source projects to produce filament this way for a few years, starting from a facebook group.
It is called "pultrusion". A key property of PET plastic is that it is not infinitely re-meltable, it gets more brittle each time. If you melt bottles to form filament, then melt it again when printing, those two re-melts are too much.
But, you can heat it enough to soften it without truly melting it -- so it does not loose strength -- and pull it through a heated nozzle, that kind of wraps the little strip around into a tube, sometimes with a small hollow center like a straw.
There is then one full melt left in the plastic's life to allow a 3D printing.
You might have to adjust for the filament being hollow and extrude a bit more.
You also get a filament with a shorter length, just the plastic from one bottle, because joining the filaments is finicky and no one seems to have come up with a reliable way yet.
In spite of all this, it's really appealing because getting one more human use out of the vast volume of PET bottles that are thrown away seems really useful.
Note, that the strips that you cut the bottles into, are useful by themselves. There are a series of youtube videos by a Russian guy building a log cabin in the woods, and he utilizes those strips extensively -- if you use them to tie things together, you can pour hot water on them or heat them with a flame and they will shrink and stick to themselves, making a really strong joint.
I think he switched to this tool and wire https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mRc7ZDRcgrQ , but he made the PET strip material popular in the bushcraft community, and from there I think it crossed over to the 3D Printing / Maker community and got picked up for making filament.
Yeah, but then we've moved to fast fashion, and we assuage our guilt by "donating" or "recycling" clothing. Of course, nobody that "donates" or "recycles" clothes has ever worn any such clothing themselves.
So sure, we get one more use out of that clothing, and then it gets put in a landfill or "donated" to west African countries that receive a year's supply of clothing every week.
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