“Growth is painful. Change is painful. But nothing is as painful as staying stuck somewhere you don’t belong.”
– Mandy Hale
1. Gearheads Playing With 3D Printers
MOVIE TIME! I love Donut Media, and it’s not because of their manufacturing content. They don’t really do this stuff, so I worried that my manufacturing industry knowledge would fact-check to death ruin the joy of watching this video. Spoiler alert (pun intended), the automotive industry folks over at Donut Media weren’t out of pocket at all! If anything, they did a fantastic job demonstrating the pain and suffering that goes into actually making a thing with manufacturing equipment and stock material. I also appreciated the transparency that higher-end, industrial-grade machines don’t necessarily make a better part; rather, they make things easier. This validates everything any grease monkey has ever told me, namely: "It’s not about having the fanciest tools. It’s about having the right tools for the job!"
2. Pizza-Making Robots
Jay-Z’s got 99 problems, and, apparently, pizza is one of them! So much so that the accomplished rapper and hip-hop mogul has invested 16.5 million quintuple-platinum smackers (put that unit in your spreadsheets, you Martin Shkreli-wannabe economists) into autonomous pizza efforts. Costco has been close for years, implementing some automation into their pizza production in the name of consistency and QA/QC, but they still require some human intervention in the workflow – and don’t go asking Dave Portnoy (NSFW language warning, but that’s Dave for you) about Costco pizza either!
3. Carbon-Eating Concrete
Yeah, yeah. I know what you’re thinking: “iT’s ExPeNsIvE,” and “They don’t even make enough blocks daily to make one house a day.” Both comments are correct. I can’t fault you there! But what are you doing to reduce your carbon footprint? CarbiCrete can remove 330 lbs (150 kg) of carbon dioxide for every ton of concrete produced, and it’s 30% stronger than conventional cement-based concrete. So, sure, they might not make enough blocks per day for a single average American house – yet. But will that change with AM? IDK. We’ll see.
4. VISION Award for Best Innovation
At the recent VISION show in Stuttgart, Germany, the award for best innovation in the machine vision industry was given to Israel-based smart inspection planning company Kitov.ai for its CAD2SCAN software. In early 2021, Kitov.ai agreed to a partnership with Mitutoyo Corp., enabling Mitutoyo to integrate Kitov.ai’s technologies across its metrology solutions.
5. Florida Company
Would you look at that? Not “Florida man” but “company”! CORPERATIONS R PEOPLE 2! I digress. A “Dutch court ruled that [Florida company] Chetu had to pay the former employee 50,000 euros, or about $48,500, in fair compensation, 2,700 euros in unpaid salary, 8,373.13 euros for wrongful termination, and his unpaid holiday allowance, according to court documents.”
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