Growth

Lately there's been a lot of talk about how we can get our economy going again. Problem here is that I don't think anyone actually knows what makes our economy run. The one constant I have heard all my life is "growth", as in we must grow the economy. I was always a little suspicious of this constant promotion of growth. If we just stayed the same, that is we maintained the same level of production and consumption, the economy would grow anyway because our population continues to grow. More people need more houses, food, cars, roads and fuel. I can understand this, but it seems like the proponents of growth always wanted more than that.

There is the replacement of older stuff that has worn out, with newer stuff that is better made, or works better, or is more efficient. Most of the stuff people have, like houses, was made a long time ago and require lots of repairs and are not very efficient, so I can understand replacement.

Then there is the proliferation of new stuff that doesn't last very long and doesn't get repaired when it breaks, or doesn't get cleaned when it gets dirty, it just gets replaced. Things like cell phones, clothes and paper cups. Does anyone patch clothes anymore? I suspect this is one of the areas "they" are talking about when they are talking about "growth".

But what I think they really mean when "they" talk about growth is the proliferation of financial products/schemes that they pyramid on top of the old banking and stock market establishment. They pile up these financial products to dizzying heights, heights that would make Ponzi proud, and call it growth, when actually nothing has grown except they amount of money they have skimmed off into their wallets. The financial world is a strange and wondrous place.

Now we take a right turn into DVD production. This is connected to the growth question, but I'm just not quite sure how.

You can burn a DVD in your PC these days. It's a little time consuming, but it is not expensive. A burner can probably be had for less than $50, and a blank disk for less than a buck. That's fine if you only want to make one disk, but if you need to make a million or ten for a new movie release, that's not going to cut it. For that you need a press, and that is going to set you back a million or ten.

Finding information on DVD replicators was a little tricky. The first part was finding out that DVD production presses are called replicators. There are machines that will duplicate DVD's automatically using the burning technique. They are called duplicators and one of those might be able to turn out a hundred disks in a day. Replicators can turn out thousands of disks a day. M2 makes the SQ20 which can produce 33,000 disks a day. At that rate it would take a month to produce a million disks. Ten machines could produce ten million.