Frontierist News

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Large economies that are getting long in the tooth have a tendency to move towards financialisation. The big money is not made through manufacture and production, but in financial services, acrobatics, and the liquidation of said manufacture and production. Arcane paper pushing and Ponzi schemes dominate the markets and make enormous paper profits for the people involved.

In such an environment neither the engineer nor the old school long term investor rules the roost. The Wall Street broker is king. And asset inflation is the name of the game.

Daily Mail (UK)

[T]he real world life is full of winners and losers. And right now, the losers are a generation of boys who have been betrayed by an education system that no longer recognises crucial differences between the sexes.

[...]

The simple truth is that by the time our boys have done 12 or even 14 years in the feminised environment of today’s schools, they all ask: “What’s the point?”

If boys are not getting into university, or not applying in the first place, it’s because they’ve been turned off learning. They’ve been given a message that it’s not for them.

Desktop Fabricator [found], originally uploaded by frontierist.

Autoblog

It’s called Fab@Home, and it’s an open-source, desktop size fabrication rig; essentially a [3-D] printer. What the system allows you to do is fabricate complex parts with a simple, low cost rig. All you need are the materials and the geometric information

[...]

The Fab@Home project is an undertaking of Cornell University, with the goal of democratizing innovation. Just as the desktop computer revolution was driven by innovation from all quarters, the Fab@Home system is a low-cost system that should be easily customized as it gets used for different materials and functions.

SFGate

Jules Dervaes, along with his three grown children, lives on 1/5 of an acre in suburban Pasadena and cultivates about half the property, or 1/10 of an acre. Given that the average American’s diet requires 1.2 acres of farmland per person, the Dervaeses are eating quite well off one-fiftieth of the land the rest of us require.

The California Department of Food and Agriculture reports that most California corn or rice farms produce an annual yield of less than a 1/2-ton per acre and the average bean farm 1/5-ton per acre. The Dervaeses’ operation is about 60 to 150 times as efficient as their industrial competitors, without relying on chemical fertilizers and pesticides.

See also Path to Freedom.