free market

"Imagine that 7 out of 10 working Americans got fired tomorrow. What would they all do? It’s hard to believe you’d have an economy at all if you gave pink slips to more than half the labor force. But that—in slow motion—is what the industrial revolution did to the workforce of the early 19th century. Two hundred years ago, 70 percent of American workers lived on the farm. Today automation has eliminated all but 1 percent of their jobs, replacing them (and their work animals) with machines. But the displaced workers did not sit idle. Instead, automation created hundreds of millions of jobs in entirely new fields." Continue reading →

"Three dimensional printing is going to be huge. Some geek friends are already starting to play around with it. With some relatively rudimentary equipment, they have printed out some pretty cool 3-D items. Most interesting from a functional perspective is they had a heavy duty steel cabinet with a missing part. They were able to print out the missing part instead of ordering, paying and waiting for the part to be delivered. They tell me 3-D Kinko-type copy shops are not far away. My guess is that we will all eventually have 3-D copiers in our homes and offices. Need a gun, coffee maker or clock? Print it out." Continue reading →