Some years back I advised my father to buy shares of a 3D printing company. I thought my idea was original, but I was very wrong. Do you know that you can see the chart of a company just by Googling it along with the word "stock"? E.g. "Stratasys stock". They're back at the same point they were before the hype. If I'd seen that chart I'd never have recommended my father to buy at the time, but I had no idea. Anyway, the hype is now over, and I think Stratasys is strong enough to survive this tsunami, so now seems like the time to actually buy shares.
Aside from the hype, it was quite a stable company, having existed for twenty-five years without much fluctuation. But I think it will take another five or ten years before they are actually as valuable as they were a few years ago. I was always playing a long game with Stratasys, as such huge developments don't happen overnight: it didn't happen with computers and it won't happen with 3D printers.
Microsoft existed from 1975 only really began to rise 20 years later. For Apple it took 30 years. Stratasys exists as of 1989, so if 3D printers are anything like computers or other devices, they'll only just start to rise in actual value somewhere over the next five years. But I have confidence that they will succeed, and I'm just sorry I can't do more than just invest — because once we have sufficiently advanced 3D printers, we hardly need anything else but software.
This may not make much of a difference here in the developed world, since we already have everything we need, and I don't think we should expect too much growth anymore. As far as our culture reaches, we are completed, and until a new culture arises to replace (post)modernism, there will not be much change. But it will especially affect developing countries, where, in combination with renewable energy, it will allow a decentralized industrialization, the way it should have happened the first time. And since all we in the developed world are looking for is new software, we'll be very interested in finding out what software their culture can come up with from their different approach on development… and coincidentally, 3D printers will be popular by about the same year, 2020, by which Google, Facebook and Microsoft have promised to bring the world online for free.
I envy the people that have a chance to work on these projects. But that ship's already left, and it's too late to board. Perhaps if I hadn't had my nervous breakdown and somehow managed to stick with the bio-engineering course I'd have been working for them now, but there were so many students that the faculty just tormented them to get rid of the excessive number. But there was nothing else I felt enough of a calling for that I would subject myself to years of humiliation for it.
So now I look back at the past ten years and think of what might've been, it's a strange feeling. I learnt many strange, wonderful things, and I think it's all worth it… but I still wonder what would've happened if they had accepted me among them, if they weren't culling any independent people out because they already had enough of them and were just looking for drudges… then I'd have been a bio-engineer and no doubt I'd have ended up convincing N to become a bio-infomaticist, and we'd be working together in Gent. But no, they thought they had enough students in those departments, so they chased their brightest students away by being too exacting on rote learning.
Somewhere out of all this rambling, in my blog I will find a way to work together with you on ways to help the world. For now, I'm mostly just investing money, trying to multiply what little I have so that I could help more people with it — but it doesn't involve real work, so it doesn't make me feel very fulfilled.
But we live in a time of change, and I can't just rush into it headlong. I need to keep researching as I've been doing, because at some point, some new system will arise out of all this. University degrees are a bubble that's about to burst: there's far more people with degrees than we can put to work. That's why they keep making the first year of particularly overcrowded courses of study as unpleasant as possible. With 3D-printers, though, it would be easy for anyone to produce anything they need to begin their own developments.
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