So I’m sat here playing with a new high tech toy, in this case a fibre galvo laser, and I’m surrounded by people who tell me I must be so excited, all the months of planning, all the research, all the money.
Do they think I just bought my first Harley after years of riding Honda Cubs or something.
Like all high tech engineering kit, it’s not just download a picture from the internet and hit “print” and send it to the colour laser printer in the corner, you’re given a great deal of control over all kinds of settings such as beam speed, focal point, beam power, beam frequency, what patterns you use for hatching, what angles they are at, how often to repeat a pass, and that means to get any kind of useful results you have to know and juggle all those things, and it goes out the window when the material changes, and you start again.
I don’t have an issue with this because I expect it, I have an issue when people who see me for the first time on my new harley and call me a fucking poser, because they don’t see the decades or riding around on a Honda Cub saving up 5 quid a week for the Harley, to give an analogy, they have no concept of what went in before.
They have no concept of the relief I feel that I got it all sorted and got it all done and got it all here and own it all 100% outright before any financial shenanigans in the world at large moved the goalposts on me.
I’m reminded of the scenario where the layman reads a contract, shrugs, and says that all seems fine to me, but his lawyer friend screams in amazement, how the fuck could you think this is fine, you could drive a truck through this clause, and look at this clause, it’s crazy, only a fool would consider signing this.
The lawyer then has contempt for the layman, because he can’t understand how the layman can not see this shit, despite the fact that this shit was created by lawyers.
It’s the same shit in the world at large, the western world is run by lawyers and bankers and politicians, an inbred bunch at best, whereas modern china is run by engineers and scientists, and nobody running the west has any idea what they means… at best they think they can continue their tricks, and by golly, sooner or later those damn chinese are going to have to lawyer up and level the playing field.
Meanwhile the chinese are holding a length of engineered 1.5″ aluminium bar in their hands, looking at the lawyers with pens in theirs, and saying bring it on bitch.
The pen depends on so much other infrastructure to have any significance at all, and it is parasitic on all of them, and once you start taking any of them away, the pen is just a pen.
I’n the finest traditions of Karl Marx, I literally own my own means of production, so I do not really care what the pens in the cities say about business leasing and business loan accounts and so on, it doesn’t affect me.
it’s like being back in the day with firearms or internal combustion vehicles when they first came out, if you wanted one, all you had to do was save up to buy one, and then master it.. there was no concept of being licenced to own one or use it or anything else.
I’m sure it will change eventually, these things usually do, but that change is 10 or 20 years away and people like me will be grandfathered in, because people like me will already have been doing it for 20 years…
The only reason it has not happened yet is because a few years ago you’d have spent US$250,000 to even approach a machine that can do what mine can do today, so it didn’t matter, because the only people who *could* buy such shit were rogue eccentric millionaires and large corporations, and the rules have always been different for them.
Now it’s coming down, and like 3d printing, the day will come when 3d printing sintered metal parts is something you can do in your garage or the spare room at home, and the difference between you and the big boys will be production speed and the elegance of the software.
When you can 3d print in metal an entire copyrighted engine or weapon or mechanism part by part, then you’ll get the licencing and legislation and control, for now it’s pre free for all, because for now that shit is still just over the horizon… for now…
‘The pen depends on so much other infrastructure to have any significance at all, and it is parasitic on all of them’
As to depending on other infrastructure and your earlier post about systemic dependencies and domino failures: the terminology that some engineers use is “firebreak”, that is build a system with enough dependency-breaking “firebreak” point that localized failure does not spread. The problem is that firebreaks cost money, and they don’t generate revenue, they just limit the damage when a failure happens.
The pen-wielders don’t that about failure if that does not affect them: when the systemic failure happens and the company (or the country) goes down, all they care about is the firebreak between that failure and their offshore bank accounts and mansions and ranches. When the big USA and UK banks failed in 2008 their CEOs and CFOs, who had run them for broke with all stops pulled and no firebreaks, all retired with dozens to hundreds of millions of wealth, which would have been smaller if they had run their banks with more firebreaks.
A guy with a way of thinking similar to yours (hope neither of you is offended!) despite a completely different background is NN Taleb, of “black swan” fame, who has recently written a book on “having skin in the game”, and blogs on the topic https://medium.com/incerto and indeed the pen wielders work hard to not have skin in the game, to put the firebreaks between themselves and the systems they manage, while designing those systems without internal firebreaks, to go for broke.
Comment by firebreaks — September 19, 2017 @ 3:11 pm