@BucknellJayhawk3
As I understand it, 3-D printing technology bears within it "rapid prototyping". Rapid prototyping--esssentially a literal 3-D expression of the kind of what-if capability started with CAD being able to explore design simulations in virtual 3-D; i.e., within the phase space of a computer screen.
Rapid proto-typing appears a many edged sword.
On the plus side, it appears capable of exponentially increasing not only exploration of virtual solutions in design/engineering/manufacturing/operation, as has CAD, but also feasibility testing of these virtual solutions with actual one off, additive prototyping. One often learns quite a lot of flaws in solutions at the prototyped stage, so this could offer more and more fitting product solutions.
On the minus side, some unfortunate by-products appear likely, based on our history with CAD. CAD and sophisticated marketing coupled with high costs of inventory storage/distribution/retailing have lead us into a kind of technological baroque goods designed for optimal breakdown for shipment, rather than optimal function for end user. Technological baroque (my term) refers to kind of hyper variation. By this I mean proliferating product variation yielding little to no increase in function, but simply contributing to new versions with almost the same utility being endlessly rolled out to give sophisticated marketing new things to hype as frequently as possible. This is to be distinguished from planned obsolescence, which was probably pioneered in its 20th Century form by the Krupp canon makers in the 19th century, who figured out they could make a better canon with scientific metallurgical knowledge and decided to incrementalize ramping up of canon barrel hardness to maximize profits and perpetuate market influence over kingdoms buying their canons over time as well. The Krups would role out the latest canon barrels hardened to allow a little more charge and so a little more range. Selling to one kingdom forced the other kingdom's to buy new canons to stay strategically competitive. Once all the kindoms had new canons, Krupp increased the hardness, and repeated the marketing process. It could have hardened the barrels massively in one increment from the start, but, well, that would have meant only one round of canon sales, and then Krupp would have had to invest heavily to discover a whole new metal/alloy to justify a new round of canon sales. This model of incrementalizing technological innovations to optimize cashflow, while intentionally suboptimizing product utility for buyer, became ubiquitous business model in the 20 Century prior to CAD. At first, CAD enabled quite a lot of product innovation simply by what-ifing existing products, then came what-ifing new materials introduced into new products, and then came incrementalization of planned obsolescence on steroids, so to speak. But centralization of production in the far east and concomitant long distance shipping in conjunction with CAD and high interest costs and high energy cost converged to trigger just in time inventory management and this in turn all together triggered a relentless insistence on packing density. Floating cheaply made, rapidly obsolete, hyper variationed, throw-away consumer junk, er, products, on gigantic ships lead firms to endlessly trade off end function of products for high density packing (a lot of product in a little space in the shipping container) in shipment. This trade-off preference intensified, when NWO central bank strategies to migrate from diversified producer markets first to producer oligopolies, and then to massive concentration of ownership of those producer oligopolies by three asset management organization using untraceable bailout monies to fund the concentration of ownership in NWO hands. The goal for the NWO was the blunt ax of more top down control by the NWO. In little time, their financialist reach exceeded their producer grasp by many orders of magnitude, which vice they then rationalized into a virtue by exploiting the very instability, chaos and inefficiency their ignorance (and their calculation)--something I like to call "ignoration"--triggered so as to enable still more acquisition and concentration with fake money they printed and gave untraceably to their big three investment management firms and still the process continues. No matter who we elect, it seems they like fake money and are elected largely by being given more of it than their opponent. But I digress.
The result was marginalizing firm competition through real innovation in producer oligopolies to near zero and replacing it with "coopetition" i.e., cooperation AND competition. The fake, or junk, economists would have you believe "coopetition" were a good for productivity AND efficiency AND innovation. NOT. Under coopetition, oligopolists essentially compete to cooperate; i.e., they compete to copy what other members innovate based on the fake money they are given by their NWO masters--the central bank owning financialists. And practically ALL innovation under this NWO is incrementalized to enable and ensure the perpetuation of their controlled producer oligopolies. But first CAD and now "rapid prototyping" achieved by linking CAD with 3-D printing, in reality push the whole kit and caboodle of R&D and production into something fundamentally NOT planned obsolescence. They have standardized and normalized "planned suboptiimization," if you will, which appears something significantly different. Products are designed to be suboptimal from the outset and incrementally improved into something suboptimal and to be replaced long before they are ever made well in terms of their utility to the consumer. There are exceptions, but these seem to prove the rule so far.
For example, when you buy a toaster today, it was apparently never intended to be any good as a toaster for the consumer. It was designed to be barely good enough to be not bought, if you will, by a consumer operating without real substitution choice among toasters with differing degrees of meaningful functionality, just choice substituting appearances of what are all junk toasters underneath. Contemporary toasters were designed to be packed, shipped, displayed, sold and thrown in the trash within two years of use. Function in use by consumers appears practically irrelevant. A contemporary toaster was designed to be made by robots, prisoners, and child slaves, shipped efficiently across the ocean in containers, along with illegal drugs, illegal weapons, and other contraband goods requiring more of the weight bearing capcities of the ships, and to fit perfectly in stacks on store shelfs, and to catch the human eye at a subliminal sensual and symbolic/sign level. The consumer's user experience with the toaster matters hardly at all in the calculus in my anecdotal. Experience. Compared to the technological zenith of a practically automatic Sunbeam Radiant Toaster made 1940s to 1980, still operating today and likely operating a hundred years from now, a contemporary toaster is a de-utilitized piece of junk designed solely to serve the interest of a vast supply chain and investment chain--NOT a consumer.
Why?
Well, the full answer would take a book. But I will distill it give one a hint of the drivers.
Because in a producer oligopolized, centrally financed (and so centrally planned to the interests of the NWO, not its consumers) economy : a.) fake consumer reviews in web sites on media controlled by 5 holding companies each actually under controlled ownership by the same three investment managers (working for the NWO) have largely replaced word of mouth as the buying criteria for most increasingly de-educated consumers; and b.) the price of the toaster is segmented by income class, so, regardless of what income class you belong to, there is no incentive to seek out the toaster with the most functional utility. Whether you are affluent and buying a SMEG for its looks, or counting ATM charges and buying a Procter Silex at CVS, its a throw away item and performs like one. It will toast your toast until it doesn't in a year or two, and to think about it at all is foolish, because you won't find ANY toaster on the market that was designed for a consumer to possess high quality and utility and durability and reliability. These attributes beneficial to a consumer, are inconsequential to the supply chain and to the investment chain. Hence, they are inexorably marginalized out of the design/engineering of the product. Using one of these cheap toasters, one can readily imagine that an artificial intelligence routine with a simulated moron IQ is used to engineer the consumer's desired function, while the best engineering minds of a generation the in the first percentile beneath those being used to design WMD, and mind control technologies, are expended figuring out how to make it easy for robots, prisoners and child slaves to make, store in containers with max units per container volume and min breakage, and also to catch the eye of mind controlled consumers predictively programmed by advertising, entertainment and public school conditioning to impulsively buy.
The key here is that almost all products have crossed the threshold into hyper variation and consumer suboptimization. It is not like the 1950s, when a Chevrolet (itself an early compromise of planned obsolescence) was engineered underneath very solidly and durably and was very repairable, and only planned obsolete on the surface. Most products now are designed and engineered sub optimally core to skin from a consumers POV. They suck. And the stuff designed for the rich, now that the rich are a mass market segment, because of globalization, sucks, too. Any product not hand crafted and hand made at the point of sale seems as apt to be as sub optimally designed, engineered and manufactured for long distance shipping as a toaster at CVS. And given that most craftsman cannot make a living any more doing bespoke work, bespoke craftsmanship is a watered down version of what it once was, also, and in some cases cannot even muster the resources needed to make something good. But I digress. In fact quite a lot of products designed with high tech by producer oligopolies for the "mass rich" are fully legal rip offs IMHO. Your Lexus is a flipping Toyota with more sound deadener sprayed in it, more padding under the hide seats, and a black box dial-up adding 15 more horsepower. The rest of the superiority exists in the perceptual "beauty" of the exterior. It can't do anything between 0 and 85 that a Toyota cannot do, as well. Mercedes Benz? Years ago, but still in the 21st Century, I recall German automotive engineers were surveyed and picked the Toyota Camry as the best designed, best engineered, best assembled, most reliable, best car made. And yes, they probably even ship better. What is wrong with this technological baroque picture? But again I digress.
The point is: rapid prototyping could, if NWO financialism succeeds in vassalizing all of EURASIA without extinction of us all by World WAR WMD, quickly lead to "Technological Baroque Runaway."
What do I mean by Technological Baroque Runaway? I mean very shortly the end consumer could completely disappear from the design/engineering calculus, except as a buying receptor to be stimulated with infinite product variation within limits; i.e., a controlled economic chaos morphing endlessly around strange tendencies (to the clouded consumer) of design/engineering paradigms endlessly, incrementally varied not toward progress, but toward triggering the dumbed down, sensual perceptions of change in consumers.
Pocket knives have already taken on this characteristic as I speak. They are not getting better, rather they are getting more individualized. I like knife A better than Knife B. You like Knife B better than Knife A. We both have our subjective preferences triggered by variations in the knives that alter only subjective perceptions of function deemed desired, not actual real world practical utility, because we don't hardly use the things in the real world in the first place. It is the "jewelry-ization" of functional tools. Jewelry-ization refers to the reduction of a tool to its signage content vis a vis other distinguishable only in terms of their signage content, not their practical utility. In a signage realm, aka a signage economy, humans think more about what they might do with tools than what they will do with tools. They think more about the appearance of the tool to others, and to themselves, than what they will actually do with the tool. We might use the knife for self defense. We might use it to cut a box, or cordage. We might use it to pry a staple, or cut a label, from another technologically baroque product we have just purchased. We might pass it on to our sons, or daughters. We might sit around over beers and compare ours with our friends. We might go camping and use it to feather a stick. We might do many things with it. But the only thing for certain to be done with it on a frequent basis is that we will sit around and admire and fidget with it. For such consumers, for persons that increasingly live in the virtual world of "might," infinite variation unrelated to real function is techno-cat nip. Survivalists especially fall prey to this, while thinking themselves the utter opposites of this type of buyer. They plan to put these knives to "hard use" if/when SHTF. I like survivalists, actually. I think they have brought a kind of rationality to things in our world full of NWO imbeciles that have normalized their reach exceeding their grasp and so endangering all of us with World War WMD. But the reality is the sheer complexity and unforeseen consequences that make World War WMD possible also simultaneously make it improbable. These NWO idiots not only cannot successfully achieve their own grand goals because of complexity and unforeseen consequence, they also cannot ensure their failure to achieve them. Thus, survivalists expecting SHTF breaking out as the new normal, simply do not grasp the confounding tendencies of bureaucratic inertia, path dependence in systems of huge sunk cost, and the desire of elites to survive at all costs. YES, they would kill, or control, us all, if it ensured they would probably survive at all costs, but its not clear to them that they would. They grasp the devils of complexity as much, if not more than the rest of us. They share in the problem of technological baroque runaway as much, if not more than we do. They know and fear that technological baroque runaway will spread like stuxnet viruses in such a world, same as we ordinary folk do and same as survivalists do.
In such a world, everyone will increasingly select a knife and a pair of tennis shoes, levels of surveillance intrusion enabled, with the illusion of bespoke uniqueness without the reality of it. At some point we will not only talk about the Turing Test for computer sentience, wherein a computer is sentient if it can fool a human into appearing sentient, whether it really is or not, but also of the Turingbate 1.0 Test of a technologically baroque product being unique, wherein it will be deemed bespoke and improved, if it can fool a person into believing it is bespoke and improved, whether it is or not.
Capice?
But I am, I suppose, engaging in handwringing on an epic scale here. Life will go on regardless and human beings will find ways to enjoy and savor and share it, even during a technological baroque runaway, so long as we don't extinct ourselves in World War WMD.
And surely, human beings will find ways to both personalize basketball shoes with 3-D printing of them, and to somehow keep the sport in a sufficiently precarious balance between virtue and corruption apparently intrinsic to it since its inception, to keep it the greatest game ever invented and to keep it yielding joys to little boys (and girls) that play it, and yielding satisfaction and/or consideration to the parents, students, fans, alums, member institutions, athletic directors' cartel (i.e., the NCAA), media-gaming complex, petroshoeco-agency complex, and the crime and intelligence organizations that likely launder vast sums of money through it. :-)
Whattta world!
Rock Chalk!!!!
