explain xkcd:Museum
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| Make It Myself |
 Title text: It's not as big a loss as it looks, because now I have leftover supplies, which will help me talk myself into doing this all over again with a new project! |
Explanation
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This is incomplete: This page was created BY A BOT MADE WITH 20 MINUTES OF CODING, 30 MINUTES OF TROUBLESHOOTING, ANOTHER HOUR OF CODING, AND A SUBSCRIPTION TO CURSOR. Don't remove this notice too soon. If you can fix this issue, edit the page! |
This strip lampoons people (commonly do it yourself enthusiasts) who scoff at the price of manufactured goods, insisting that they could build them more cheaply, only to end up spending more time and money than the product would cost in the first place.
In this case, Cueball starts by appearing to play the cliché straight, insisting that he could make an $80 product himself, using $10 worth of parts and an hour of work (which, for most people, would be financially advantageous). However, he subverts this by immediately adding on additional costs and time commitments, before ultimately admitting that he'd also have to actually buy the product when his homemade one breaks. Rather than the typical pattern of finishing the project and realizing he'd overextended himself, he is predicting ways the project will go wrong from the start, but seems determined to do it anyway.
When building something yourself, there may be only a relatively small amount of raw materials that are needed, and some people fail to recognise other costs involved and assume they can assemble them into a finished project in short order. However, once the project begins, additional expenses often pile up. More supplies might be needed, sometimes in small quantities, but you still have to purchase larger packages. Specific tools and equipment that you don't already have may be needed, and this may not be obvious at first, explaining the multiple trips to the hardware store. If errors are made during the assembly process, material may be ruined, requiring additional purchases. And projects often become more involved and take more time than originally expected. All together, Cueball calculates that he'll spend $60 on parts, multiple hours (which are, themselves, likely to have a value greater than the price of the item), and multiple trips to the hardware store (with associated costs of fuel, etc.) trying to avoid paying $80 for the item, and that his homemade version will then break, requiring him to spend another $80 in addition to all that.
The title text attempts to justify the money he spent, by pointing out that he has leftover supplies. If only part of the purchased supplies were needed, or of the supplies included tools, then he might not assign all the cost to one project, because they can be reused. However, his prediction about "doing this all over again with a new project" sounds ominous in light of the comic. If his DIY projects don't ultimately save money, than being encouraged to start another may not be beneficial. He also has no guarantee that the supplies he has will be suitable for a future project. This may encourage him to use them in suboptimal ways instead, potentially compounding his problems.
This is a common source of tension in DIY projects. While the cost of manufactured projects are generally significantly higher than the cost of materials and labor to make them (due to costs of storage, overhead, transport, and profits for all the businesses involved), they also have the advantage of economies of scale, mass-manufacturing techniques and low-cost labor. For an individual to attempt to replicate that manufacturing process for a single item often involves additional costs, may not be worth the time that was spent, and may not be up to the quality standards of manufactured goods.
Of course, there are various non-cost reasons why people might choose to do home projects, such as self-satisfaction, learning, ability to make a bespoke solution, and so on, so a negative cost analysis doesn't necessarily mean that the DIY approach is always inadvisable. However, since Cueball's primary motivation appears to be financial, it doesn't seem to have much to recommend it in this case.
Transcript
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This is one of 43 incomplete transcripts: Don't remove this notice too soon. If you can fix this issue, edit the page! |
- [Cueball and White Hat stand together looking at two boxes on the right side of the frame. Each box has labels saying "Sale" and "$80" on one of the visible sides of the box, and illegible text on the other visible side of the box. Cueball is holding his arms out toward the boxes.]
- Cueball: They want $80 for this?
- Cueball: I could make one myself for $10 in parts, an hour of work, a trip to the hardware store, another $30 in parts, another few hours of work, two more trips to the store for $20 more in parts, another hour to redo the first hour of work because I messed up, and $80 to buy this when the one I made breaks.
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Maybe it's more of statistics than exhibitions. --While False (speak|museum) 21:17, 3 October 2022 (UTC)
pixels-assembly-3.png
how is it 0 bytes?? i see that it is shown as 0 bytes on the wiki, but the file itself, when downloaded is 5kb! how???108.162.221.209 16:41, 4 October 2022 (UTC)Bumpf
- If the question is how it can be written like that here, the answer is that I used the numbers of the wiki. —While False (speak|museum) 19:18, 4 October 2022 (UTC)
- Sorry, should have made it more clear. Do you know why it is shown as 0 bytes on the file page? 172.70.134.103 12:37, 7 October 2022 (UTC)Bumpf
- There's always the possibility that this is actually the Null image under the .png file format. Every other .png is defined by the delta required to display the desired graphic when starting from the baseline of this 'ur'-image, but if you ever wanted to display that graphic the undocumented format specifications allow you to omit all unnecessary bytes (including the magic header bytes) and it will happily produce its hardcoded "it's a PNG!" preprocessing template, which happens to be this image. Obviously, the PNG spec (and, ultimately, the original ancestor of the detailed source code tree for every subsequent implementation) was written before Randall ever got anywhere near to drawing this image so the chances are slim that he just happened to luck upon the exact image that happens to have a 100% compression rate because it just happened to consist of something Randall wanted to draw, and in the manner of Randall's artistry. But it's a non-zero likelihood that an arbitrary artist might draw exactly the same image as a purely arbitrary "index null" page's collection of pixels and so... This might not be the Best Of All Worlds, but there has to be some highly fortunate occurance to balance out all the unfortunate ones, statistically, and this is ours!
- (Or maybe there's a minor bug/data-error in the way the wiki database serves the front-end webserver, but I can't ask you to believe something as trivially random as that!)) 172.70.90.245 15:03, 7 October 2022 (UTC)
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- Sorry, should have made it more clear. Do you know why it is shown as 0 bytes on the file page? 172.70.134.103 12:37, 7 October 2022 (UTC)Bumpf
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