On “Making While We’re Breaking…”

“Oh shit…” you’re thinking.  400 people on a cruise ship have it, at least 80,000 thousand people worldwide have it…what will become of the world, right?

Well, it’s going to change.  Bigly and fastly.

The world has become dependent on long supply lines – and to our own detriment.

But, before you get too depressed about it, remember that we were headed down the crapper  anyway.

That’s because the Four Horsemen of Apocalypse include (presently) locusts in Africa and the Middle East, Compounding of the National Debt, the longer-term realities of Resource Depletion, and now, yeah, China going offline.

How can we change?

HI.  My name is George Ure and this is another one of my hare-brained websites.  You’ve maybe heard of the other sites?  UrbanSurvival and Peoplenomics?  The UrbanSurv site is free and Peoplenomics is good enough in its specialty (alt. finance) that it funds projects like this one.

There are to be only a few ads on this site.  One, which should show up this week, will be for Jim Lewis’s businesses:  eMachineShop.com and Pad2Pad.com.  His eMachineShop site allows people to download very easy-to-use product design software and then upload the work for production.  A credit card and a few weeks go by and then your parts show up.

His other site, Pad2Pad.com is the same idea, but focuses on building up printed circuit boards.  Jim has orchestrated some of the best minds on the planet to make this all happen and it’s a very impressive effort.

Along about here, you might wonder “ OK, why is George gushing about Jim’s businesses?

Simple answer:  There’s a ton of work to be done, and in a very short amount of time, to transition the world in a hard turn from  corporate globalism to the new  dispersed model of society.

I’ve writen an entire book recently, on just this point:  The new to roll society away from being so damned money-centric and instead beingh centereds on the things life is really supposed to be about:

  • Fun!
  • Spriritual growth
  • Research
  • Exploration
  • Scholarship
  • Making
  • Living in Harmony with the Earth
  • Oh!  Did I mention having  Fun??:?

That’s why I don’t spend much of my time playing the market – age is beginning to “friction me” a bit (age 71).  So, the right thing to do is share knowledge, talk concept, and live as an example – with all my faultys and flaws.

So here’s where Ultra-Make fits in:

Jim had a concept – years ago – called “mass custom manufacturing” and it is right here, right now.

Except, that the pieces are not quite “all lined up” yet.

I’ll be writing more on one of these on the Peoplenomics site shortly – it has to do with how the media is acting more like a fun-house mirror and not giving us a “useful reflection” of what and who we really are.

The other paper – and we can begin the work here I suppose – is to come up with a file structure so that someone like Amazon can begin to sell what we will call “MakeZips.”

The idea is that instead of having Amazon acty as the robotic warehouse for everything in the world, we can repurpose Amazon (to some extent) as a “small parts warehouse.”

Things get really interestiong when you go back and read up the history of the Heathkit Company.  Wikipedia  rolls it out this way:

“The Heath Company was founded as an aircraft company in 1911[3] by Edward Bayard Heath with the purchase of Bates Aeroplane Co, soon renamed to the E.B. Heath Aerial Vehicle Co. Starting in 1926 it sold a light aircraft, the Heath Parasol, in kit form.[4] Heath died during a 1931 test flight.[5] The company reorganized and moved from Chicago to Niles, Michigan.[6] In 1935, Howard Anthony purchased the then-bankrupt Heath Company, and focused on selling accessories for small aircraft. After World War II, Anthony decided that entering the electronics industry was a good idea, and bought a large stock of surplus wartime electronic parts with the intention of building kits with them. In 1947, Heath introduced its first electronic kit, the O1 oscilloscope that sold for US$50—the price was unbeatable at the time, and the oscilloscope went on to be a huge seller.

The company then moved into Amateur Radio equipment and was hugely successful.  As a ham radio geek myself (AC7X) I still use a 50-year old Heathkit SB-220 linear amplifier, with original  Eimac 3-500Z tubes (made in America) several times a week to bash out Morse code.

What was the appeal?

There was electricity, soldering, mechanical assembly, some of the best manuals and “how to do it” technical writing EVER.  Even better, the Heathkit company is coming back to life with new products slowly coming online.

When you look at what’s going on at Jim’s businesses, you see Heathkit entering a surgence, and then appreciate that STEM emphasis in education might just provide for a globally dispersed locally manufactured option, one can almost get the feeling that China’sa virus outbreak could be one of the best “warning from the future” ever bestowed on humans.

Because single points of failure are bad.  Very bad – and may even be fatal.

Resilience, though?  Ah – very good indeed.

Ultra-Make is about the “whole McGillah.”

Making can be fixingd a lawnmower, changing a tire, baking home-made bread without preservatives and crap in it.  Or, it can be printing out plastics parts for some product you need.  Maybe assembling those home-printed parts with some Big Pieces from Jim’s businesses.  Or, maybe Amazon sends you just the electronics and a disk and you print your next computer monitor.

Pretty interesting and exciting world in which to live, isn’t it?

Come soon to a planet near you.

Make time.

george@ure.net