Tag: You’re Doing it Right

Everybody is Sick of Obama

I try not to focus too much on individual politicians unless they’ve done something especially egregious. It wouldn’t matter to me who occupied the White House, I would oppose that person. But I find it amusing how Obama has gone from the beloved celebrity to an irritant in the eyes of the public. This continuously dwindling public imagine isn’t surprising considering the number of scandals that has befallen his administration. From Fast and Furious to the ongoing National Security Agency (NSA) fiasco we have seen Obama receive and ever growing slew of negative publicity. What makes this downfall even more entertaining is the constant attempts by Obama to divert peoples’ attention.

Obama met with the higher ups of several major technology companies. During this meeting the representatives of the technology companies had to prevent Obama from diverting the meeting topic from the NSA fiasco to the Healthcare.gov fiasco:

The top leaders from the world’s biggest technology companies pressed their case for reform of the National Security Agency’s controversial surveillance operations at a meeting with President Obama on Tuesday, resisting attempts by the White House to portray the encounter as a wide-ranging discussion of broader priorities.

Senior executives from the companies whose bosses were present at the meeting said they were determined to keep the discussion focused on the NSA, despite the White House declaring in advance that it would focus on ways of improving the functionality of the troubled health insurance website, healthcare.gov, among other matters.

I have no love for the leaders of the present technology companies either. From my point of view most of them are merely lower level oligarchs in the great state/industry marriage. But it’s entertaining to watch the lower tier oligarchs rebel against the upper tier oligarchs. The NSA fiasco has cause users to question most major technology companies, which threatens profits. If there’s one thing the lower oligarchs won’t stand for it’s the potential to lose profits. Such a threat is enough to get them to become restless and even go against the desires of higher oligarchs. In this instance the lower oligarchs weren’t willing to let the upper oligarchs sweep the NSA fiasco under the table.

Affordable 3D Printers Capable of Working with Metal on the Horizon

The march of technology cannot be stopped. When Solid Concepts unveiled their metal 3D printed guns people on both sides of the aisle agreed that the technology to print those firearms was cost prohibitive. As it turns out technology marches very quickly and we’re on the horizon of affordable 3D printers capable of working with metals:

So far affordable 3D printing has been more about using polymers. Yet we all know that the ‘real thing’ must be made of metal. But the price of 3D metal printers has been the major stumbling block towards making the use of this truly 21st century technology an everyday routine. That is why only wealthy scientific organizations, such as NASA, or the military can afford metal 3D printers that cost well over $500,000.

Now Professor Joshua Pearce and his team of 3D apostles from Michigan Technological University are proclaiming the era of Open Access 3D Printing, having published their “A Low-Cost, Open-Source Metal 3-D Printer,” article in the journal, IEEE Access. Practically anyone who is interested is now free to print objects and make a 3D metal printer of their own.

The team admits that this is only a beginning. The printer is quite basic, but it does print complex geometric objects, putting down thin layers of steel with its kit worth $1,500. The most important components are a small commercial MIG welder and an open-source microcontroller.

At this rate we’ll probably see a firearm printed with metal on an affordable 3D printer sometime next year. After that we can put the entire gun control debate to bed. Controlling easily reproducible goods is possible no matter how large or powerful the state is.

Writing Circuits

File this under awesome geeky shit:

Good-bye, breadboard. Scientists at the University of Illinois have come up with a conductive, water-based ink that lets you draw working circuits on an ordinary piece of paper. They’ve packaged the product into a rollerball pen, called Circuit Scribe, and if you want to be one of the first to get hold of one, the team is crowdfunding the project on Kickstarter right now.

A pen that can draw working circuit pathways? That’s pretty damn cool. In fact I can think of several practical jokes involving conductive ink. On a less nefarious note, these things would have been a ton of fun in my college electronic classes.

Another Reason I Want to Move to Iceland

I often mention my desire to escape the United States. There are only two things I can see for the future of this country: economic collapse and an all pervasive police state. When these two things are finalized I want to be watching from afar. Central America and East Asia are two possible destinations I’m considering. Another possibility, the one currently at the top of my list, is Iceland.

Iceland has a lot going for it. The island nation has a history of statelessness, an anarchist as the mayor of its capital city, the wherewithal to strike against the bankers that caused its financial crisis, the fortitude to stand up for whistle blowers, and the balls to tell agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) to get the fuck out.

In addition to all of those things Iceland, unlike the United States, also has a police force that isn’t bat shit insane:

Icelandic police have shot dead a man who was firing a shotgun in his apartment in the early hours of Monday.

It is the first time someone has been killed in an armed police operation in Iceland, officials say.

That’s right, yesterday marked the first time that armed Icelandic police officers killed a person. I don’t think there’s an individual state within the United States that has made it an entire year without its police officers killing somebody. Iceland’s history of focusing on arbitration over brute force continues to shine through even though its stateless era ended almost a millennium ago.

Second 3D Printed Metal Gun Unveiled

Solid Concepts, the company that brought us the first 3D printed firearm made out of metal, have unveiled their second 3D printed metal gun:

Solid Concepts announces the successful creation of the world’s second 3D printed metal gun. Our second iteration is composed entirely of Inconel 625, a material that is stronger than Stainless Steel (and a bit heavier) save for the springs which were not 3D Printed. The gun is once again composed of thirty-four 3D Printed components. Our second gun will be stress relieved and post processing will be by hand once again.

Inconel 625 is a harder, stronger alloy than 17-4 Stainless Steel. We modified the geometry for this second iteration to incorporate different tolerances in order to make hand finishing sufficiently easier. With our first prototype, we had to hand sand to perfect a few tolerances, but our tweaks to the design should remove the need for such sanding. Our first gun is now up to 700+ rounds.

Once again I feel that it’s necessary to stress two facts. First, 3D printers capable of working with metal are extremely expensive. Second, as the technology of printing with metals advances it will also become cheaper. It is only a matter of time until 3D printers capable of working with metals become affordable to small groups of individuals. Gun control, never an attainable goal anyways, is now all be entirely dead. Once small groups of people can afford 3D printers capable of working with metals gun control will be entirely dead.

As the technology of 3D printers advance gun control advocates will almost certainly resort to attempted censorship. But that battle is already lost. The Internet was designed as a mechanism to share information. It’s very good at that task. What it isn’t good at is restricting the flow of information. Any attempt to censor information on the Internet is a lost cause from the word go. In other words, gun control cannot succeed because in this day and age the only tool in its arsenal, controlling access to firearms, is a pipe dream.

Occupy Wall Street Wipes Out $15 Million of Debt

Remember Rolling Jubilee? It was a project started by Occupy Wall Street to buy up outstanding debt just to forgive it. Back when the project was first started organizers were able to buy up $14,000 of debt for $500. Approximately one year later the organization has successfully purchased and forgiven $15 million of debt:

A group of Occupy Wall Street activists has bought almost $15m of Americans’ personal debt over the last year as part of the Rolling Jubilee project to help people pay off their outstanding credit.

Rolling Jubilee, set up by Occupy’s Strike Debt group following the street protests that swept the world in 2011, launched on 15 November 2012. The group purchases personal debt cheaply from banks before “abolishing” it, freeing individuals from their bills.

By purchasing the debt at knockdown prices the group has managed to free $14,734,569.87 of personal debt, mainly medical debt, spending only $400,000.

Kudos to Occupy’s Strike Debt group are certainly in order. Freeing people from $15 million of debt for a mere $400,00 is impressive. I hope this project continues on and meets with even greater success.

The Beginning of the End for Pharmaceutical Monopolies

My love of 3D printer technology expands far beyond the firearms field. Being able to build complex things in the comfort of our own homes stands to upset the balance of power in many markets. One of the most valuable aspects of 3D printers is their ability to put an end to many monopolistic practices. If you’re able to download designs for an item and print it in your own home then patents become irrelevant, which is why this story about 3D printers capable of making drugs interests me:

He shows me the printer, a nondescript version of the £1,200 3D printer used in the Fab@Home project, which aims to bring self-fabrication to the masses. After a bit of trial and error, Cronin’s team discovered that it could use a bathroom sealant as a material to print reaction chambers of precisely specified dimensions, connected with tubes of different lengths and diameters. After the bespoke miniature lab had set hard, the printer could then inject the system reactants, or “chemical inks”, to create sequenced reactions.

The “inks” would be simple reagents, from which more complex molecules are formed. “If I was being facetious I would say that to find your inks you would go to the periodic table: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and so on,” Cronin says, “but obviously you can’t handle all those substances very well, so it would have to be a bit more complex than that. If you were looking to make a sugar, for example, you would start with your set of base sugars and mix them together. When we make complex molecules in the traditional way with test tubes and flasks, we start with a smaller number of simpler molecules.” As he points out, nearly all drugs are made of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen, as well as readily available agents such as vegetable oils and paraffin. “With a printer it should be possible that with a relatively small number of inks you can make any organic molecule,” he says.

The real beauty of Cronin’s prototype system, however, is that it allows the printer not only to control the sequences and exact calibration of inks, but also to shape, from a tested blueprint, the environment in which those reactions take place. The scale and architecture of the miniature printed “lab” could be pre-programmed into software and downloaded for use with a standard set of inks. In this way, not only the combinations of reactants but also the ratios and speed at which they combine could be ingrained into the system, simply by changing the size of reaction chambers and their relation with one another; Cronin calls this “reactionware” or, because it depends on a conceptualised sequence of flow and reorientation in a 3D space, “Rubik’s Cube chemistry”.

Large pharmaceutical companies enjoy an advantage in the medical field. They can patent chemical compounds and effectively enjoy a monopoly on producing that compound for two decades. During that two decade period the consequences of monopolies afflict everybody who wants or needs that drug. Namely the pharmaceutical company enjoys the ability to jack the price up to whatever it desires since no competition is allowed to enter the market until the patent expires. 3D printers capable of producing drugs could overcome this issue. Suddenly people capable of reverse engineering the drug (say, by looking up the patent and going from there) could post blueprints online for all to download.

Another potential for these printers is the ability to drastically lower the cost of developing new drugs. Individuals with the proper background could develop new drugs on their person computers and perform tests by printing the new drugs. The overall costs would likely drop considerably, which would almost certainly cause a major leap in innovation.

What Vigilantism Can Look Like

What do you think of when you hear the word vigilante? For many people the image of a violent revenge seeker comes to mind. But vigilantism is little more than the result o f individual taking the law into their own hands. Oftentimes the result is merely the solving of a crime that wasn’t solved by police:

The family of a kidnapped Louisiana mother tracked down and killed the father of her child in the abandoned house where he was allegedly holding her prisoner, authorities said.

Bethany Arceneaux, 29, of Duson, La., was abducted in the parking lot of a daycare where she was picking up her 2-year-old at approximately 5 p.m. on Wednesday, Lafayette Parish Sheriff’s Department Captain Kip Judice told ABCNews.com.

[…]

Authorities searched the sugarcane field Wednesday night and all day Thursday, but to no avail, Judice said. The cane towers as high as eight feet tall and was “a brutal search area” for officials, he said.

It wasn’t until Friday morning, when Arceneaux’s family members conducted their own search in the same area that they came upon a secluded, abandoned house behind a cluster of trees.

The house was directly across the street from the field where Thomas abandoned his car, but only the home’s roof was visible from the road, Judice said.

“[The family] converged on a piece of property about a mile from where the car was found,” Judice said. “One of the family members heard what he thought was a scream.”

Arceneaux’s cousin approached the home, kicked in the door in and entered, Judice said. Inside, he found Thomas with the woman. Thomas then began stabbing Arceneaux, and a confrontation ensued.

“The cousin, who was armed, began firing several shots at Thomas,” Judice said. “After a couple of shots, [Arceneaux] was able to get free of him and they escorted her out of the house.”

People often think that vigilantism is wrong and law enforcement should be left to professionals. But professional law enforcement are often unable or unwilling to solve crimes. Sometimes you need the tenacity of an individual directly invested in the well being of a victim to achieve a happy conclusion.

Just as there are bad agents in law enforcement there are bad vigilantes. On the other hand, just as there are good agents in law enforcement there are good vigilantes. In fact I would argue that a vigilante is less likely to cause unneeded harm than police officers because vigilantes are more accountable to community members. Far too often police are put on administrative leave until their own department rules them innocent of wrongdoing after its investigation of the matter. The actions of a vigilante are most likely to be judged by community members and it’s unlikely that a community will be satisfied with a vigilante investigating his or her own actions.

A Good Use for Prisons

Prisons have few uses beyond being a source of slave labor for the state and its cronies. At least that is until you give a prison to some creative people who are interested in providing their computer a product. After that you can turn that worthless old facility of cages into a wonderful distillery:

WARTBURG, Tenn. — Voters in Morgan County have approved a referendum that allows an old prison to be turned into a distillery.

WATE-TV reports voters approved the measure Tuesday night by a margin of 1,224 ballots.

The station reports the vote clears the way for a developer to turn the old Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary into a distillery with a campground and other attractions.

I would love to see more prisons receive this kind of treatment.

3D Printed Metal Gun

Once again zerg539 was kind enough to forward some excellent information to me. Most of are aware of efforts to produce firearms using 3D printers. The biggest limitation so far has been materials. Plastic isn’t the best material to build an entire firearm out of. Nobody has reported printing a firearm with one of those fancy, and every expensive, metal printers until today:

Austin, TX – Solid Concepts, one of the world leaders in 3D Printing services, has manufactured the world’s first 3D Printed Metal Gun using a laser sintering process and powdered metals. The gun, a 1911 classic design, functions beautifully and has already handled 50 rounds of successful firing. It is composed of 33 17-4 Stainless Steel and Inconel 625 components, and decked with a Selective Laser Sintered (SLS) carbon-fiber filled nylon hand grip. The successful production and functionality of the 1911 3D Printed metal gun proves the viability of 3D Printing for commercial applications.

And it works quite well:

As you can guess, some people are unhappy about this. I think advocates of gun control realize their movement’s days are numbered. 3D printers are only going to become more affordable and widespread. It’s possible, and I would argue likely, that a majority of homes in this country (and others) will eventually have some kind of fabrication unit. These fabrication units will start off as simple 3D printers capable of working with plastics but will eventually become sophisticated units capable of working with various materials, including metals. Once that happens the entire concept of gun control will be dead. Just as the Internet has effectively killed censorship, 3D printers will eventually kill prohibitions of physical objects. Heck, as the prices of 3D printers capable of working with metals come down they will eventually reach a point where a handful of individuals will be able to pool their resources and buy them.

Decentralized systems are notoriously hard to shutdown, which is why I advocate setting up decentralized firearm manufacturing groups. Having the ability to manufacture firearms outside of the state’s control would do a lot to tip the balance of power from the state back to the people.