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z2005-10-11- Doctorow Themepunks
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Whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
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last edited
by BillSeitz
on
Aug 13, 2008 7:02 am |
I'm enjoying Cory Doctorow's [Theme Punks] serialization on Salon Com. New Economy, Free Agent, Open Source Hardware, etc. In her discussions with Kettlewell, he'd confided that it had turned out to be harder to find suits than it was finding wildly inventive nerds. Lots of people wanted to run businesses, but the number who actually seemed likely to be capable of doing so was only a small fraction... "They (Capital Market) can't figure out how to value us. Our business units have an industry-high return on investment, but there's not enough of them. We've only signed a thousand teams and we wanted ten thousand, so 90 percent of the money we had to spend is sitting in the bank at garbage interest rates. We need to soak up that money with big projects - the Hoover Dam, Hong Kong Disneyland, the Big Dig. All we've got are little projects."
His Oct'2007 "Other People's Money" story seems like a similar world. Gretl laughed. "You VC-s--scale, scale, scale! It's all you think of. You're wrong, as it turns out. This business decomposes into four elements: materials acquisition, design, fabrication and retail. They all scale like crazy. "Take materials. After the [WTO], the Chinese spent 25 years brute-forcing the problem-space of all possible 3D plastic objects that an American might pay money for. There is no shortage of that stuff--most of it is sitting in international waters somewhere on a container ship, waiting for someone to pay the Carbon Tax-es to land it somewhere. I can bring in all the junk electronics and chassis and parts that I want, and I print the actuators, controllers, wires and the rest of it here. "DeSign? Design's easy. Roll the parts through the tumbler and let each one get scanned up good. Then run the evolutionary Genetic Algorithm to see how they can fit together. I just watch it, tweaking it, culling the ugly mutants, cultivating the pretty ones. I can do fifty original designs in a day, and by the time I'm done with any random container, I'll have used up more than 80 percent of its payload. The rest goes to some feedstockers to be eaten by bacteria."Manufacturing--that's just monkey labor. Easy. Every kid takes shop class nowadays, especially the girls."
Bill Seitz, fluxent at gmail dot com, Weblog