Word: steeling
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...first new Pragma A-3000. The $110,000 robot, which has just been licensed by General Electric, is assembling a compressor valve unit from twelve separate parts. Its two arms can do totally different jobs at once. When it picks up a slightly defective gasket in its gray steel claw, it immediately senses something wrong, flicks the gasket to one side and picks up another. The Pragma produces 320 units an hour, without mistakes, and it can labor tirelessly for 24 hours a day. That makes it roughly the equivalent of ten human workers. Furthermore, it can easily be reprogrammed...
Near Golden, Colo., at the Department of Energy's Rocky Flats plant, a technician pushes a red button marked REQUEST TRANSFER. Behind a 10-in.-thick concrete wall, a pair of claws reaches out to grasp a stainless steel container filled with pink powder, then lifts it into a furnace where it is baked at 950° F until it turns into a nondescript gray button three inches in diameter. Such a button could be worth $100,000, for the job of this robot, which goes into regular operation in a few months, is transporting reprocessed plutonium...
...billion in interest and capital due next year on $21 billion in foreign debts. Already Warsaw must spend 82% of its foreign sales revenue to service such debt. Most of it stems from bobbled efforts to build an industrial base after World War II. Two primary exports, steel and textiles, have been hurt by slack demand abroad. Polish agriculture contributes little either to foreign earnings or domestic stomachs. The workers' strikes, set off by hikes in meat prices, added to the economic breakdown...
...regulation. He has already said he will scrap the failed Carter wage and price guidelines as soon as he takes office, and some expect him to proclaim a moratorium on the issuance of new rules by Washington's myriad regulatory agencies. Says W. Martin Dillon, chairman of Northwestern Steel and Wire Co. of Sterling, Ill.: "The biggest thing the Reagan Administration could do is just stay out of our hair...
...tied up traffic. The lanes did not work, the mayor said, because bikers did not use them-his own bureaucrats' statistics contradicted him, but never mind-and everyone else thought they hopelessly slowed motor traffic that even at the best times inches along in a fuming stream of steel through midtown. Koch's decision was both premature (the lanes should have been tried for at least a year) and a bit scatterbrained, but it was also calculatedly political. In the street wars among cyclists, motorists and pedestrians, the mayor judged that he had been backing a loser...