How dairy robots are changing work for cows and farmers

This again!

We manufacture plenty in America. Every company that I've worked for over the last 30 years has manufactured something or the other. We just don't manufacture cheap stuff like toasters.

Or cheap stuff like $3,000 laptops?

What's the profit margin on that laptop?

Exactly like a $3,000 laptop. $3,000 is insanely cheap when you think about it. With a $3,000 laptop in hand you can produce more value for the world than with tools that cost millions of dollars. Economies of scale is a weird and wonderful thing.

For Apple (which is what I had in mind) I think they aim for 50%.

I’m not sure I’d agree with that. A skilled person can use a laptop to create a lot of value, but a laptop on its own isn’t going to produce much. (And a skilled programmer could produce nearly as much value with a $300 laptop.)

What value do you think a multi-million dollar passenger jet creates own its own, absent a skilled pilot and crew? But where skilled operators are at the helm, the laptop has the potential to create considerably more value, yet costs almost nothing. It is really quite amazing how cheap they have become. Early general-purpose computers did cost about as much as a jet, so them becoming dirt cheap wasn't a foregone conclusion. But we're lucky they did.

We can know the value of something by simply conducting an auction and seeing what it sells for; that's the floor of its value. We can establish the ceiling of its value by seeing what it retails for. Fancy Apple laptops float around $3,000. They're not worth more than that, and not worth less.