3D Printing is Vital to the United States - Financial Times
I have waxed prosaic and prolific on the potential of additive manufacturing, and how the future of free people depends on it. All too often, I am left feeling like folks are unable to grasp the import of the technological paradigm shift that is happening. But, I'm not alone in seeing how the ability to manufacture an amazing array of technically demanding parts, tools, and goods ourselves changes everything.
I ran across this video by the Financial Times, and am happy that staid prudential industry recognizes the necessity of embracing disruption, because that front runs that disruption and enables us to benefit from it, rather than be destroyed by it.
Too many forces and disruptions are in motion today, and many, if not most, of us are going to suffer negative harms as a result of our inability to get in front of all of them. The more adaptive we are, the better we'll come through. We face threats to agriculture, to commercial goods and services of every kind, to money itself, and any one of these threats can overturn our economic stability, or - if we're taking advantage of opportunities - raise our standard of living.
I hope all of us can see what's coming, and get on the right side of history.
we could also go back to using our hands and market economy
instead of planned economy, plastics, chemicals destroying nature, no need for people except for useful dumb consuming idiots
ah no, we bombed the Kaiserreich
the comparison to michelangelo is just fucking sad
how deep has humanity fallen ? they act like parasites
no creatoing power left to use
I also find the claim he wouldn't be able to use a 3D printer ludicrous. Does he think he's better than Michelangelo?
Anyway, back when Stone Age tech was the best way we had to do things, there were a lot fewer people to feed. While we're feeding ~8B people using what is basically Stone Age technology today, there are a lot of problems coming from that continuation of such primitive methods. We need to use aquaponics to eliminate biocides, habitat loss, waste, and, perhaps most important, parasitic losses. That last is the reason we are still using Stone Age tech to feed the world. The parasitic losses are the only way parasites gain wealth and power. Overlords are the parasites we need to eliminate.
3D printers are one part of the switch to aquaponics, because individuals with 3D printers can make almost every part of an aquaponics system that will feed them for the rest of their life. Maybe today entry level 3D printers can't make LEDs or the pump for feeding the plants the waste from the aquarium, but those are temporary limitations on the technology.
The neat thing about decentralized means of production is that they scale down better than they scale up. Overlords cannot benefit from them as much as we can. Today is the very peak of centralization of industry, and of the parasitic losses we suffer to our enemies. Every passing day increases the dispersal and development of decentralized means of production, and decreases the flow of wealth to overlords.
If we go backwards technologically we prevent that ongoing transition to an overlord-free world, maintaining centralization and our subjugation to overlords, extending it longer with every step backwards we take. The way out of the trap we are in is forward, straight to the stars.
Can you imagine any limit on the wealth and freedom our sons and daughters will have when they can print their own spaceships, use the resources on any or every star system they find, go anywhere, and do anything they want?
A month ago today the very first 3D printed spaceship was launched. I think that is one of the most significant events in human history, the beginning of the quest to fulfill our destiny: to bring abundant life to infinite barren wastes, to seize the stars of the heavens and illimitable resources free for the taking, to create of them inconceivable wealth, in absolute freedom; to craft with our own hands unimaginable felicity and enjoy it in our good company, forever.
hmmmm
I don't really believe in stone age tech - have you never seen old world tech ?
but yea, I would also call monoculture stone age like (even though they probably had more like permaculture back then ^^)
I'm also unsure if I want to have plastics (especially printed plastics) in my food production systems
If you consume food provided by commercial agriculture, plastic will be part of the food production system, and the same is true for water. Only if you yourself produce your food and water can you exclude plastic from the systems that produce them. 3D printers are capable of manufacturing goods from literally every material that humanity has used to make things with. You are not limited to printing plastics with 3D printers. For example, Relativity Space printed it's recently launched spaceship out of an aluminum alloy. There are an almost infinite supply of examples you can find on Youtool of video of 3D printers being used to print things made of a variety of materials, such as concrete, chocolate, and even printing liquid water out of the water vapor in desert air.
There are certainly other means of making things out of other materials than plastic. The Romans often made water pipes and basins out of lead, being unaware of it's toxicity and finding it a convenient material to make pipes and basins with. Myriad examples of people making pipes and basins of clay exist. However, you will have to make a water provision system completely separate from commercially available water supplies, because all commercially available water supplies use plastics, particularly in pipe and basins.
What is demonstrable is that making things with other means are not able to be automated, at least not at any scale potential to home or individual manufacture. OTOH, using a paste extruder is relatively common and inexpensive with a 3D printer, and either a form of concrete, which can simply 'set' and chemically harden, or clay, which can be fired in a separate process to be turned into a ceramic, can be used in home manufacture or individually.
What can be said is that if you choose and act to eliminate plastics from your food and water provision systems, you will be making those systems in their entirety yourself, and unless you use a 3D printer to do so, you will be making those systems entirely by hand.
I don't disagree with any of this.
However most people are working overtime just to keep their spot, keep lights on and fed, and keep the govt away.
Some people can become self-sufficient yes, but there will always be the burgeoning masses.
Those masses necessitate the scale of consumption and production we have today for food, energy, and material.
It's likely that you couldn't reach many of the achievements we have today without the large gradient of economic classes/tiers.
But I think it's becoming clear that the system is reaching an upside down point because we have so many people doing jobs where there is no real product.
Look at all of the wealthy young people from simply playing video games or dancing and making videos online. And yes the same is true of much of corporate media and entertainment for the past several decades.
An equally troubling metric is how many people are employed by the government now.
We see automation popping up everywhere, and they say a large portion of the public has simply walked away from the labor force.
I think we can see that there's an obvious decline in society overall, and I fear that we're only in the beginning.
I think we're going to see more infrastructure failure before long. But the immediate threat is the lawlessness and desperate people.
You see mobs of people raiding stores in urban areas pretty often. It was often for clothes, electronics, and luxury items, but I've seen where they clear out the food too now. That's a notable marker.
Major stores closing because of theft. Hell Walmart had a report that people are only buying food now, and they don't make much profit on that.
Self reliance will be key if this continues, but geography and proximity to dense populations will also become important factors.
Many of the old farmers I've known did it all. They were a mechanic, electrician, carpenter etc.
Most people now don't even know how to change a tire, and in times of hardship they'll demand the authorities make things easy for them. Or they'll join whoever is most convincing or intimidating.
Evolution works through the death of the poorly adapted to changing environmental conditions. People that remain committed to traditional methods despite circumstances no longer enabling those practices to prosper suffer the consequences. Hunter gatherers were outcompeted by Neolithic farmers that could support professional militaries with food surpluses. Centralization enabled more advanced technology that enabled higher productivity. That productivity gradually increased as technology advanced.
However decentralization of the means of production is the cutting edge of technological advance across all industries today. Advances in productivity no longer are promoting centralization, but are now promoting decentralization. Decentralized bespoke production provides higher quality goods and services custom made for specific consumers, eliminates waste from mass production, and decreases costs by focusing on local resources reducing transport costs. Most importantly, households that produce themselves the goods and services necessary suffer no parasitic losses to oligarch profits, and create no taxable events. Overlords create overhead on centralized industry that is the majority of the production, and these parasitic losses are eliminated by decentralization.
Centralization is not economically competitive with decentralization. Worse, it seems apparent that overlords are deliberately sabotaging industry and supply lines, as before you can remodel industry and community is is necessary to destroy the prior systems so that you can build new systems in their place. Since foods are being replaced with bugs and lab converted wastes, the agricultural system is being destroyed. The same destruction is necessary to change transportation, travel, power consumption and production, politics and economics that all must first be deconstructed before being replaced with new systems. Clearly such destruction will be very hazardous to people dependent on centralized production for their survival, even existentially. That seems to be likely to be deliberate given the globalists insist on population declines.
As conditions become worse due to sabotage of extant supply lines, people will be left with a choice between adopting production mechanisms they can employ, or going without goods and services. For things like food, power, and the like that are necessary for survival, they will produce what they need or die, if goyslop hasn't become available to their bugpod before traditional foods are eliminated. While food remains on supermarket shelves, that adoption remains unreasonable, unless people are able to predict coming shortages and prepare in advance. After local stores are closed because flash mobs make them unprofitable, if food is not otherwise available, people can starve or use aquaponics to grow food at home, and people will be strongly encouraged to adopt decentralized means of production in agriculture.
People that cannot will not survive the collapse of the supplies of food produced by centralized agricultural production controlled by overlords intent on reducing population. People will leave areas mobs rob, or die if their movement is prohibited. People that become dependent on mob raiding for necessities will either become producers when victims no longer exist because stores have closed or moved and taken their customers with them, follow their herds of prey, or perish if they cannot.
Evolution will happen.
Thanks!
Do you think the availability of some of these decentralized technologies is a ticking clock? For instance, 3D printing.
I've never looked into how the filaments are produced, but I'd guess it requires a fair amount of energy and resources that aren't common in most places.
You mention aquaponics, and being able to produce components for that. What pieces are difficult to make? Like pumps or maybe hoses?
There are many different materials that additive manufacturing can make things with. Filament is pretty much entry level hobbyist material. Most hobbyists start with such materials because they are easy to use. The next step for 3D printing is using different materials, such as pastes like chocolate, cement, and clay. These printers are today being made available to the market niches, like baking, where there is demand. Hobbyists maintain cutting edge development in design of 3D printers, and experiment with wire feed welding, metal powder sintering, and recycling of PET beverage containers for making filament at home.
I think a breakthrough will come when 3D printers are adapted to produce filament from recyclables themselves, rather than using a separate machine to make filament. It just takes a tape cut from a water bottle and puts it through a nozzle to create filament that can be put through a nozzle to print, so simply putting the tape into a 3D printer cuts out most of the steps and equipment necessary to using recycled PET.
It's primarily a hobbyist field today, and the development of 3D printing itself is decentralized. It's not particularly energy intensive, compared to household appliances, depending on the size of the 3D printers themselves. Obviously printers large enough to make large items, like car fenders, or chairs, require larger motors and more energy, but most people entering the hobby aren't making things much larger than a 1/3 of a meter in a given dimension, which is comparable to microwave ovens or televisions.
Hoses are very easy to make with a 3D printer using appropriate filament, but pipes are easier yet, since they don't need to be flexible. It is mass production providing parts to varied users with different use cases that makes hose so common, but making parts yourself for your specific design enables pipes to serve, and that is as easy as 3D printing gets. Motors and electronics are mostly beyond 3D printing capabilities at the hobbyist level, but aquarium pumps are extremely common and inexpensive. LEDs for lighting where sunny windowsills aren't available are also beyond most hobbyists capability, but printing circuits is becoming a specialized segment of the hobby, and I expect LEDs are being printed by those leading the development today.
The rest of an aquaponics system is cups or gutters to hold the plants, and a tank for the fish or crawdads. It's about the most simple equipment that can be imagined. It's the application of the parts that is specialized, not the parts. While most people haven't escaped the indoctrination to buy food, as food provided by legacy industry becomes less suitable, or people become more aware of it's drawbacks, the voluminous information already available regarding aquaponics will be applied by more and more people. I have run into people with large aquaponics setups nominal for commercial use in their apartments, in my work as a handyman. People mostly don't understand the simplicity and utility of aquaponics, and that is the primary barrier to widespread adoption today. As the quality of food commercially available declines, motivation to overcome that relatively minor learning curve will dramatically, and suddenly, increase.
Hikkimori
even automation utopia doesnt bring you shit if the alive people are missing..
only declining biorobots
I'm not sure what you mean by missing?
NOT THERE
yea but if I use 3d printers and plastics to build systems for creating my own food... I can also just buy it..
maybe I have some pros in costs.. at the long term
but not really in health
so I produce food and water myself but still have plastic in it and therefore my body
I dont have the money for a good metal 3d printer xd
not even for a welding kit rn
also those space "ships" more like dicks are also not where we are going ^^
why not uses and synchronize with nature? and praxeology?
permaculture? elektrokultur? creative life force, orgone?
you can use mushroom to build/ grow lightweight but very stable houses, sits, furniture
ok it is not printing - and alive tech instead of dead..
well in germany we still built with real stuff - until modern times..
not like paper houses and plastic pipes in america..
maybe humanity is in automation madness while not being able to do anything themselves anymore..
thanks for the summary of my pov :D
except I think that it is not possible for a normal human rn to do it with a 3d printer
normies are still limited to plastic 3d printing
why should I costly 3d print a metal pipe if I can just cheaply buy a metal pipe from my neighbour
(market economy)
I'm all for your freedom to do as you wish. However, I am not your overlords, and I am confident they disagree with me. All manner of building codes and restrictions are increasingly placed on us that prevent us from doing things the way we want. Someone recently trolled me by asserting that if we try to grow our own food, drones with flamethrowers will come to our apartments and burn every speck of 'illegal nutrition'. If you settle on some planet somewhere else, no one will ever have any say about what you do. While you can't do that yet, I am certain this ability and absolute freedom is coming to humanity, and I am ecstatic about that.
We're going to bring abundant life to a barren universe and I'm happy about that.
Again, that is absolutely preferable IMHO to buying plastic pipe from your local hardware store, or paying a plumber to use plastic pipe. However, metal is not the only alternative to plastic today.
IMG source - cocoapress.com
This printer prints with chocolate. You may realize right away that chocolate is a paste, and with minor adaptation instead of chocolate you can print with clays or cement. A great many local soils have a variety of clays freely available to anyone with a bucket and a spade, and the knowledge of how to fire clay and produce ceramic long predates metallurgy. It is far easier. Clay pipe also long predates metal pipes, and is more inert chemically.
3D printers are generally able to make stuff out of anything people have ever used to make stuff with, and a lot more besides. I make a lot of stuff without 3D printers at all. I do not claim that only 3D printers are the threshold between centralization and decentralization. The point of decentralization IMHO is that it's decentralized, and we're going to do stuff in just about every way it can be done. That makes it a lot harder to stop us from doing it, because regulations and laws are specific, which limits applicability.
When you make what you use, overlords get no cut of your production, and you are not taxed on it either. Whether or not you make better stuff than you can buy, or trade with your neighbor, or profit financially directly from your production, an essential fact of decentralized production is that it eliminates parasitic losses, and overlords are the parasites eliminated.
I only seek for humanity to be free, prosperous, and happy. Do that however you want, and I'll be completely satisfied you have exceeded my expectations of you.