burnsd, you’re right; you’ve written a good summary. Nicely worded. Bugsy and the others who made this happen have heard this all before, more than twice.
Patience. We’re all hoping the people who made the Manker first round parts are not also making parts for China’s aircraft or fission power plants.
The history of the development of how to make interchangeable parts is being repeated in China now. From scratch, apparently.
Ironically, this rediscovery is (we can hope) teaching people who made our parts what they could have learned from history.
As Marx pointed out, history repeats itself, for those who did not learn the history, and repeats “the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.”
Our flashlights this round must be the farce. We can laugh so we don’t cry over the imperfections and appreciate the result, imperfect as it is, is wonderful.
So it can be improved.
Marx further wrote there that success happens when those involved “… constantly criticize themselves, constantly interrupt themselves in their own course, return to the apparently accomplished, in order to begin anew; they deride with cruel thoroughness the half-measures, weaknesses, and paltriness of their first attempts ….”
Yep.
We’ll see better work coming, to the extent the people at the bottom of the heap there learn this stuff.