The phone in your pocket is fucking with you. We all have one of those snitch / manipulation machines and we all know it’s absolutely chock full of shit trying to make you panic.
Even as we know the thing is lying it still works. I strive to be as based as I can be but I don’t have quite the wisdom to ignore everything that comes out of it. I’ve successfully predicted 9 out of the last 3 bear markets. Clearly I’m not good at separating actual bad news from manufactured bad news.
That’s how it works. Shit in media is always more fucked than the world truly is.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying it’s all puppies and rainbows. I’m just saying I was told things would be so very much worse and it wasn’t. I’m Gen X. Growing up, the world stopped pointedly ignoring me just long enough to badger me. I’d be dead in a thermonuclear war, there would be no fuel for automobiles, starvation through overpopulation was inevitable, and we’d all die of AIDS. That was pretty much the prognosis for a kid in high school in the early 1980’s. Fun times!
If you think it’s different now, you’re wrong. Look at what a high school kid is taught today. Those poor bastards have so much bullshit dumped on them it’s amazing any make it to adulthood intact.
That’s why I increasingly avoid politics on my little blog. Yet something just passed my “deliberately ignore it” threshold. Why? Because it was so dumb I could see it glowing. I like my little 3d printing hobby and media is telling I should panic about its impending regulation.
3d printers, like all tools, are just one of many abysses into which the incapable gaze. Technology, whether it’s a steel chisel or a tomato seed or CNC mill, require mastery. First mastery of the self and after that, understanding of the real world. Nobody in any meeting anywhere can make a chisel cut clean or a tomato seed germinate. Reality is where the bullshit spell fails.
It’s hard interacting with the real world. It’s unforgiving and detailed. This is something everyone is supposed to learn through experience. Yet, for perhaps the first time in history, we’ve got a populace that mostly hasn’t made the leap. People with mental models that lack real world exposure; to them food really does come from the grocery store. A few hundred years ago you couldn’t be that dumb. You’d see your corn crop change (maybe die) based on the rain and if you weren’t paying attention the family mule could kick you. Interaction with the real world teaches humility and wisdom.
Anyway, I like playing with my 3d printer. I’ve just scratched the surface of what it can do. My skill at directing the device has a long way to go. Good clean fun!
Meanwhile, dipshits in Washington State dipped into their bag of insecurities and came up with a classic from 2005; “3d printed ghost guns”. People who cannot change the spark plug on a car think a firearm made by Smith and Wesson is somehow less crimethink than one made on the build plate of a nerd’s 3d printer. That concept alone is worthy of deep examination, but I digress…
The proposed rule is clueless. The idea is that anytime anyone wanted to print anything, a file would be sent to a central database (which does not yet exist). This entity would magically determine whether it’s an allowed thing or a not allowed thing. After that determination the 3d printer would be “allowed” to make the print.
I laugh my ass off thinking about the kind of code that could somehow sort between a batman mask, a dildo, a piece of tubing for an aquarium air filter, and a firearm. Nobody who’s built anything thinks that’s a trivial task. I think the proposal includes CNC machines too. Yah right!
I had a hearty laugh and ignored it. It’s funny when idiots want to shoehorn a government meeting into every silly string dispenser, decorative coaster, dinosaur shaped kite holder, fishing lure, and Garfield themed coffee cup coming out of a zillion printers. It’s even funnier when they interact with real machinists doing real industrial work; piston bores, engine manifolds, and fuel injection nozzles. Very clever people use very impressive machines to keep the world running. Sliding a g-code file back and forth to a cloud server to put the genie back in the bottle is right up there with outlawing 10mm sockets.
For those of you that don’t know, any 3d printer can run completely off grid. And if someone really wanted to nerd out (assuming they’re slightly smarter than the average bear) they could build one from parts. To really go down the rabbit hole, anyone who can machine the nozzles in jet engines at a Boeing facility or to fabricate a part for a Caterpillar bulldozer is so self sufficient as to be basically from Mars.
I joked that they’d proposed a rule with a built in IQ test. It would only apply to people too dumb to operate the technology. I could make a similar rule that your dog isn’t allowed to drive a Maserati.
I quickly forgot about it. (I briefly pondered a fictional short story about a “mechanical pirate”; some dude with an unregistered 3d printer in the back of a van in Tacoma. The last human being that knows math in Greater Seattle. Making and selling illicit toy cars in a place where drugs are legal but manufacturing is not.)
No idea is so dumb that it can’t grow. Supposedly, California joined the same bandwagon. They added talk of “registering” 3d printers so that none can be “off grid”. Which is fucking hilarious!
None of this is real. It’s not workable. There have been no votes or actual real laws. For all I know it’s just the idea of some spastic Karen. Or maybe it’s AI slop oozing from the lofty goals of true artificial intelligence all the way down to making fake pronouncements about bullshit.
Whatever it is, it ain’t my concern. I’m happily learning how to make stuff with my printer. It’s both moral and legal and pretty much unstoppable regardless. I just can’t take seriously anything on the left coast. But it got me thinking, how much of this bullshit only exists trying to stir up good natured 3d printing nerds?
Think about it. Why bother nerds? If a nerd wants to make scale model additions to his model train set that’s the least political human on the face of the earth. A dude like that is good for society. He’s better than ten HR harpies bitching at the HOA about lawn conditions.
I wonder if the real goal to make sure there’s nothing beyond the reach of political chaos? Anyone capable of making a 3d printed toy locomotive is, by definition, well capable of doing whatever the hell they damn well please. If they’re spending their time mounting LED lights in a replica Jacobite Steam Train because they liked it in Harry Potter, isn’t it that good enough?
How much of our populace is threatened by a person fully checked out of politics?
Nor do I understand why idiots prefer “a thing made by a big company” as morally and legally superior to “goofy shit made by maniacs in cluttered garages”. It feels like projection.
I think people who can’t do anything get insecure over the idea of people who can build.
Anyway, I’m sure it’s nothing. If it isn’t that’ll be good news too. Nothing would create a huge surge in 3d printing technology like trying to outlaw it in certain states. If Governor Hairgel outlaws basic printers like my Bambulab A1, all printers within five years will be half price, come with pinstripes, run on a single battery, generate filament from old 2 liter Mountain Dew bottles, and be ten times faster.
As the song said: The future’s so bright, I gotta’ wear shades.*
A.C.
*Yes I’m aware the song can be interpreted as an ironic dystopic warning about “nuclear science”. Tough shit, I don’t fear technology. (I might hammer it with a rock as necessary, but fear? Never!)
Never mind the guy with some machine tools. I have an older “clone” of a Bridgeport vertical mill and an even older South Bend engine lathe. Bought both nearly 20 years ago at an auction from a company that was closing. Paid a total of $650 for both and then another $4-500 refurbishing them. I have made car parts, parts for other machine tools, even parts for a friggin washing machine (antique one but still). If I so chose, a firearm would be no problem. Would it be as pretty as the latest from Colt or Smith and Wesson? Nope. But if needed it would kill you just as dead.
I merely note that my flip phone does not have data, and it has a removable battery so it only works as long as I want it to do so.
AC, I’m not worried at the moment, but something similar happened with printers and scanners, and paint software.
Try scanning currency into photoshop…
Depending on when you did it, what hardware and what actual software you use, you either can’t, or will get a warning and have to jump thru hoops.
Or try printing with an inkjet that is out of yellow. Even if you tell it to print using only black, it probably won’t because the yellow is used to embed a serial number in the print.
Government agencies went to the manufacturers and got changes and additions to the firmware. Nice company you have there, wouldn’t want you to get charged with counterfeiting now…
Right now the hobbyist machines are capable and can be recreated outside of industry, and achieve near pro machine results, but how long will it be before they are like toys compared to machines from regulated pro companies?
There are always workarounds, you can famously make an AK from a shovel (at least that is the lore) in the mountains of Afganistan, and Improguns @ https://homemadeguns.wordpress.com/ has pics of people in the favelas and jungle making stuff that goes bang, but in the US, if you go to a machine shop and try to get sheet steel laser cut into the shape needed to make a folded receiver for an AK, they WILL recognize it, and refuse.
You can still counterfeit currency, but not as easily as scanning and printing…
I guess what I’m ambling toward is that I do think they will get the changes and restrictions they want. If they can eliminate the ‘point and click’ crowd, and raise the barrier to entry for the stuff they want to suppress, they will take that option.
nick
It’s an AK.
Just use a pattern and a plasma cutter with contact tip and spare the laser guy or the guy with a plasma table the time to make important parts like fire pit rings.
Or use an acetylene torch, a Death Wheel, hacksaw, Skil Saw with cutting blade, Sawzall or shoot a gangbanger with your Marlin Model 60 and get a full-auto Norinco, and teach the young to do the same.
Two points:
I actually DO allow my dog to drive my car (OK, it’s not a Maserati) but I NEVER let go of the lead so that’s ok … maybe. >};o)
I am willing to bet that 99.99999 recurring percent of humanities advances and technology developments are down to detail obsessed nerds in sheds beavering away at something or another until they get results. A 3D printer is a tool just like any other. Hell, with a file, a vice and a pair of pliers someone sufficiently determined can manufacture just about anything (including other tools needed to do the job) including firearms, knives and other assorted stuff to give those of a nervous disposition the vapours.
Here in NZ there is a magazine published (I read it in the barbers while waiting) called The Shed. Some stuff falls into the “No shit, Sherlock” category but others are as “professional” as you like.
No, the technology genie is out of the bottle and in the wild. They can (maybe) register future printers to a specific address/person but the existing ones? They can produce parts to make another printer and can be kept going indefinitely with a bit of ingenuity.
The Government of the day has the attitude of a Victorian nanny. “Go and find out what your brother is doing and tell him to stop it”. They cannot bear the thought that someone, somewhere is doing something without their approval and permission.
Phil B
I think you’re right. People who can build stuff, fix things, and think for themselves are like sunlight to vampires. They’re not very susceptible to the BS that politicians are peddling.
By the way, I haven’t heard of the folks who want to regulate 3D printers, but it reminds me of the rules in Great Britan outlawing pointy knives. Knives are legal, as are files, grinders, and other metal working tools. But I guess it makes somebody feel safe.