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It's Time to Change the Steel
We now have a greater flexibility in work with chemistry and the elements due to the advent of the computer in the laboratory.
The basis of steel is iron which is much more than a metal. And because of that, it's alloys don't have to be metal.
The strength of industrial steel alloyed with other elements in great extensive combinations, sometimes with combinations of catalai that are in tension one with another, could be seen as weak by itself but extremely strong and durable when woven into certain geometric structures. Hence a light material easily transported to the site, then woven into place by apparattai which I call "spitters", for example to produce an earthquake-proof building or the tunnel complex for an underground highway of fuel-cell powered vehicles.
The sheer complexity and enormity of the combinations and the cataloguing of the intricacies would tend to be an industry only the United States could excel in for many reasons, such as the enormity of the task, the extensiveness of the shipping co-ordination and something often never noticed.
The homogenous nature of American society. Extreme undertakings suggest a division of labor only obtainable by a close-to-total as possible blend of human beings from genetic backgrounds of all sections of the planet in the presence of a climate of sufficiency. No group of human individuals has the genetic history to complete extreme tasks. Each group brings to the shop a certain set of inherited characteristics which can only work when in tandem with other characteristics of other groups.
This is why the European society was able to enter the industrial revolution and why the United States society was able to enter the computer age. Because of the homogenous society. Other geographic areas are catching up, but there is a drawback. It takes at least two or maybe three generations for a genetic grouping to recover from the cultural shock and other trauma of the new environment.
Here's a tip for the new homogenous societies, though. If you include stimuli from the old country, the "roots" of their genetic past, it apparently helps.
There are at least two or three thousand variables of iron that can be immediately had that are heretofore unknown to mankind. Such as alloys with iron in rocket fuel, iron and silicon in glass, iron and gold (in combination with a few dozen catalai) in conductors and spacecraft, iron and carbon in fibers, iron that is liquid at room temperature, iron and alloys that form a power source by variable electrically stimulated shape memories, iron in equipment that extracts gold from deep water geysers. You may find those variables to literally be infinite in number. Now that's an industry competitors could never match.
Each of our elements in the earth is like a symphony. We as a people never got round to really appreciating that, I suppose. Among these elements it's humble ones like iron and carbon and oxygen and silicon that are major players. That's your problem with the steel industry right there. Too much business as usual and not enough enthusiasm.
If you're going to prosper in a thing, you've got to get excited. I can foretell for you which industries are doomed to fail, just look at the bland faces of the employees as they come to work. If there is no life in the industry it is already history. The work ethic is not enough. An industry is destroyed by the mundane.
Still, the ones who have operated the steel industry from the ground up, from the workers to the management, deserve respect. My grandfather worked in a steel mill. It's an awesome thing to work with the big metal. All metals are beautiful. It's something even to touch them, a block of steel, a bit of iron, some titanium, aluminum, gold, silver. Copper.
It's time to get excited about it and to get out there and see what else we can do with them. -- Or you can sit down and give up and Dale will haunt you. The key to movement is diversity. It is the difference that gets exported to foreign markets. It's the exceptional that gets demanded. If you've just got more of the same you won't even get noticed eventually. Use the same six-shooter and someone faster will eventually come along. You'll never run out of iron. The asteroid belt is full of it. It's the punctuation of the stars.
Copyright (c) 2005 by Paul A. L. Hall. All rights reserved.
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