Re:Insufficient data
by 3pt14159 on Friday July 23, 2010 @07:02PM
(#1542648)
Although I didn't like the slant "silly Libertarian, politics is for grownups" I like the thought he put into how the economy is shifting. One thing that should be noted is that even though 10,000 engineers might be somehow involved in the creation of, say, an iPhone; proportionally 9000 of them may have only "spent" a relative fraction of a second on just the iPhone. For example, the engineers in charge of designing a common capacitor that is manufactured in the billions are not working a fully person-year on the iPhone. It's like saying that my tumblr blog needed 100k engineers and programmers to create. 2000 for the linux run server, 9000 to create web standards, 7000 to create network protocols, etc. It just gets silly - work overlaps.
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It's true that they're not working full-time, but I think it's somewhat indicative of how the knowledge and supply chains are spread out. If you were to try to recreate a modern computing infrastructure on a desert island, you'd have to assemble a lot of those people, from the people who know how to smelt ore, to the people who can figure out how to build capacitors, etc.
A wild card that I'm not sure has been tested is how much you could get away with recreating solely from published materials. Given some smart people with a university-library-quality set of books (and let's say a good index), how many of them and how long do you need to go from stone-age to iPhone?