On Apr 11, 8:17*pm, Dan O wrote:
On Apr 11, 1:52 pm, Helmut Springer wrote:

Michael Press wrote:
The here used term "exactly identical" is clearly defined as "no
differences".

Impossible in physical manifestations.

Which is irelevant in a thought experiment.

Then it's purely hypothetical - useless and irrelevent. *The girl in
the example (long since snipped) clearly treated the question in the
practical sense. *Mr. smarmy pants thought himself very clever and
superior to suck the poor shallow thing in for yet another classic
"Frank 'n' Fredette" story, but...

Oh, bull****. My brief point was that automation can produce more
consistent, higher quality products at lower prices, and that
industrial robots are now important tools for automation. The girl
treated the question in a way that showed her gullibility towards
marketing, believing that _anything_ that costs more _has_ to be
better.

Not only are there no "exactly identical" products, but in the
practical world it stands to reason that batches of examples that
appear outwardly identical, but are known by upstream suppliers to
have a significantly higher potential for defects, will wind up in the
hands of some as-is and/or all-sales-final lowball discounter.

You're proving that if you try hard enough, you can not only miss the
point of the story, you can ignore the past 300 years of industrial
history.

Is it better to buy a modern electronic consumer product that's
assembled by hand or assembled by machine? A cell phone produced in
the typical, highly automated way will be much more reliable _and_
much less expensive than would a cell phone produced by hand-soldering
the hundreds of connections to the circuit boards, if such a thing
existed. The same is true of coffeemakers, electric drills, light
bulbs, and thousands of other products. Hell, do you think the head
of your favorite hammer was hand-filed out of a solid block of steel?
And if so, how do you think they made the file?

Yes, there is no such thing as a hand-assembled cell phone that's
"exactly identical" to one assembled by automation. That's because
nobody would never market one assembled entirely by hand. It would
cost far more and not work as well, if it could be made to work at
all.

Regarding your "outwardly identical, but known to have more defects"
scenario: I was clearly talking about _completely_ identical.

Nonetheless, you're welcome to search deep discount "as-is" retailers
for iPhone 4s that were produced in some muddy backwoods factory by
people hand carving the plastic. Will you look online, using a hand-
carved, hand-wired computer? Or will you shop by bike, on one made of
tubes hand-beaten out of steel refined by the puddling process?

- Frank Krygowski