I’m very aware that the first person who can apply this device to drugs, booze, or sex, will be a billionaire overnight. But they are expensive, slow, and you have to be a design artist because the current types of 3D scanners are some kind of hoax.
I thought I made it clear, but I guess I didn’t, that these printers change everything. Think of something difficult to get that I could order, print, and deliver today, and I’ll cut you in for 25%. You see something you like, instead of ordering it, you print it.At this point I can only afford a plastics printer, but I’m not after the plastic, I’m after the technology. I first noticed the printers because robots have plastic gears, see, this blog is about what I find interesting, not everybody else who, if that’s what they want, should write their own blog.
One could start regularly visiting Thingiverse to see what people are already physically designing for these printers which, in about 10 or 15 years, should be common. There are printers which will carve the object out of wood, but I don’t find that suitable for objects with an internal structure, although I’ve heard these carvers can create awesome molds (inverse carvings) for everything from concrete to chocolate. And no, I was not joking about the thing growing me some perfect teeth.
[Author’s note: the financial incentive is already present. To make the interlocking plastic clips for my toothpick display, the best design I could find wants an estimated $2,500 for the prototype. We know what estimated means. The MakerBot Replicator has dropped from $3,800 to $1,749. The toothpicks have already generated more than $10,000 in revenue without the clips. This is why I warn the world not to ever let me get any real power in my hands.]
A chuckle over morning coffee at the bakery as I read some of the flyers that still appear in my mailbox. It was a glossy booklet of contractors, such as roofers, A/C repair, kitchen design, that type of thing, but the funny part was they still had their heads in the pre-2006 Depression sand. Their pricing was all ranged for credit cards; nobody has $7,500 cash to laminate a floor. As I’ve said, a million small businesses in America with this bogus business model have to go under to purge the system and bring prices back down to reality. Reality being what people can afford for cash, or quoting myself, “You can’t get much realer than cash.”
Which brings me to the Nashville delay. (How was she supposed to know her best friend’s husband, whom I’ve never met and, if they are like the rest, I couldn’t give a shit about, died a damn year and a half before I was promised results last Tuesday?) It has set me back enough time and money to consider delaying Colorado. I’d have double the budget if I left in September, but I’d no longer have a free place to stay, again thanks to Nashville. I will remember that for what is, even for me, a very long time.
To complicate matters, I may have met someone. This one is, like myself, gregariously outgoing—but provided, and this is important, only when it is worthwhile. I’m not on this planet to uncover hidden talents. In the dating game if you got a card, you play it. But there is a definite lower social limit to being popular. For example, when I’m in a room full of deadbeat women, I know to sit there like a lump and chill every conversation. There’s a lesson in that, ladies. And this new one seems to have learned it, albeit the hard way.
I’m reminded how I was clued in. Centuries back when I was young, I dated a gal who entertained passes from every bozo in the territory. Jerks, losers, drop-outs, pool hustlers, you name it, if I turned my back for ten seconds, she’d have one chatting her up. When I asked her to knock it off, she’d retort it was her duty to be nice. When I asked if she supposed she was being nice to me, oh, well, I’m supposed to know her and take it all in stride. She maintained it was harmless. Yeah, until Apollo the Wop dialed her one midnight on my bedside unlisted phone.
In my defense, I point out that I was only 19 years old at the time. And I honestly thought the young women I dated would never do such a nasty thing, it was something older women learned. (I was mostly right.) I’m reading “Denial”, a murder mystery involving a psychiatrist who likes his tootie. Another somewhat deep work by Keith Ablow (mentioned here January 2011), this one is more hard-hitting and equally gruesome. Ablow is a doctor, which shows if only because he is so aware of the shortcomings of other doctors. Much the same way I view computer whiz kids.
Who is Jeremy Blum? He is a very well-funded engineering grad at Cornell who seems to have independently taken the same path with Arduino as I have, including videos of his work. The similarity ends there, as he has professional video gear and records only his successes, but the idea is the same. I recommend you at least view his Arduino “how-to” videos. It’s amusing how, despite living on different islands, we somehow drifted in the same direction.
Something that doesn’t surprise me, since I’m right smack in the middle of the boomer crowd, is that electronics prices have doubled right at the time I have money to buy them. Just when I’m able to conceive of data applications with switches and relays, these things took a fantastic leap in price. This is not odd when you consider that a business cycle is 7-1/2 years, so baby boomer behavior more strongly affects people born slightly after 1988, 1981, 1973, 1966, 1959, and so on. Anything the boomers did came crashing down on us, not the boomers that caused it. I remember some of those years well, the market crash of 89 and the double-digit inflation after 81. Each time I made a move, the pig in the python blocked my way. Individually, most boomers are nobodies, but 85 million of them can sleep anywhere they please.
Ah, but this time (for sure), I’ve got them beat. Even when they retire with their monster houses, most of their income will be needed for upkeep, the average boomer house being close to 40 years old now.. A third of them are already underwater. They have zero experience living on a real budget (see “real” defined above).
Only by moving against the grain did I finally break free from the stranglehold that mob had on the world for forty years. During the 80s, did they give a hoot that I was losing ground because they bid up house prices faster than I could save a down payment? (Think about that, in the time it took me to save up another $2,000, those fools would borrow another $10,700 to buy the same house.) The next 15 years (two business cycles) will show us how they like their own medicine.
