[citrin_ru]

Modern economy cannot exists without economy of scale. It's unfortunate is that if you want something else than millions of other people the price likely will be prohibitive - small scale production is not viable economically, especially for high tech components and devices.

> I don’t think it’s true that the capabilities to make these devices are lost.

I think they are. Not all knowledge is captured in documentation and blueprints. A lot of knowledge existed only in brains of now retired people. And even blueprints are lost when companies go out of businesses.

[TheOtherHobbes]

This is - in passing - why billionaire prepper fantasies of surviving an apocalypse on a private island are insane. Sooner or later spares and consumables will start running out, and without global supply chains nothing is repairable.

You might get ten years if you stock up on ten of everything you can think of, plus a few things you can't, but after that things will start breaking down, and you're going to start running out of replacement parts.

And you'll be out of consumables long before then.

[doublepg23]

I had this discussion with my friend before and it really doesn't take long until you really are screwed in an apocalypse scenario.

We could barely agree on the probable scenarios - "dollar collapse" is bad enough without even getting into "aerosol transmissible Ebola" or the like.

[prmoustache]

> I think they are. Not all knowledge is captured in documentation and blueprints. A lot of knowledge existed only in brains of now retired people. And even blueprints are lost when companies go out of businesses.

We are talking implementations details to build the slimmest walkmans made in history.

That doesn't mean we couldn't make a much better sounding tape player protoype and still a slimmer one than the We are Rewind player and what is available today on Amazon, then iterating on making it smaller and smaller over the models. The main issue is still money and market, you can't spend that time on iterating and improving the design if the market is small and you are losing money.